David Freed is an accomplished American author, journalist, and screenwriter, best known for his Cordell Logan mystery series. He was born on an Air Force base in the Deep South and grew up in the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. Freed decided to pursue a career in writing after realizing that his grade point average would not be sufficient to gain entry into medical school.
As an investigative journalist, Freed has worked for the Los Angeles Times, where he covered various catastrophes, affairs of the state, and the activities of the United States military, including Operation Desert Storm. In 1993, Freed won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Rodney King riots in 1992, which he shared with his fellow writers. In addition to his work as a journalist, Freed has also spent countless hours conducting research in dusty archives, meeting with confidential sources in bars and parking garages, and digging through trash cans late at night.
Freed is also an accomplished screenwriter, having worked on mostly action movies that were rarely produced. He has also worked with the U.S. intelligence community and has been a licensed pilot for over 30 years. Freed is a contributing editor at Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, a special assistant professor of journalism at Colorado State University, and teaches creative writing at Harvard's Extension School.
Freed's Cordell Logan mystery series has received critical acclaim, and his latest novel, "The Kill Circle," is the sixth installment in the series. In addition to his work as a novelist, Freed has also written an 8,600-word exposé in The Atlantic, detailing how the FBI pursued the wrong suspect in a string of anthrax murders following 9/11. The exposé was honored in 2011 as a finalist in Feature Writing by the American Society of Magazine Editors.