Francine Mathews

Francine Mathews, who also writes under the name Stephanie Barron, was born in 1963 in Binghamton, New York. She was the youngest of six sisters, and her father was a retired general in the Air Force, while her mother was a woman who loved to dance. The family spent their summers on Cape Cod, and it was there that Francine developed her passion for Nantucket and the New England shoreline. After her father's death during her freshman year, she attended Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington, D.C.

Mathews' college experience was formative, as she attended Princeton and majored in European History. She also developed her writing skills by learning to write news stories for The Daily Princetonian, which led to two part-time jobs as a journalist for The Miami Herald and The San Jose Mercury News. Mathews won an Arthur W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities in her senior year and took a course called "The Literature of Fact" from John McPhee, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and staff writer for The New Yorker. This course would have a significant impact on her writing style.

After college, Mathews spent three years at Stanford pursuing a doctorate in history but left with a Masters degree. She then applied to the CIA and spent four years as an intelligence analyst. During her time at the CIA, she worked on the Counterterrorism Center's investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. She also had the opportunity to debrief former President George Bush in Houston in 1993. Mathews' experiences at the CIA were profoundly fulfilling, and she remembers her colleagues' extraordinary intelligence and dedication.

Mathews left the CIA in 1993 and wrote her first book in 1992. Since then, she has authored twenty novels of mystery, history, and suspense. She is a graduate of Princeton and Stanford and presently lives and works in Colorado. In her free time, she enjoys skiing, gardening, needlepoint, and buying art.