Brenda Buchanan is a writer and lawyer who lives and works in the beautiful State of Maine.
Brenda’s first three books, Quick Pivot, Cover Story and Truth Beat, featured Joe Gale, a contemporary newspaper reporter with old-school style covering the courts and crime beat at the fictional Portland Daily Chronicle. The Joe Gale series grew out of Brenda’s first career as a newspaper reporter, which followed a childhood in a newspaper-reading family in a mill town in Central Massachusetts.
The journalism bug bit hard at age 16 when Brenda co-wrote an exposé about the enormous disparity in spending on boys’ and girls’ sports at her high school. The powers that be were not amused, making the experience a great lesson in the power of the press.
While an undergraduate at Northeastern University she worked in the newsroom and as a reporter trainee at the Boston Globe. After graduation she became a reporter and columnist at the York County Coast Star in Kennebunk before attending law school at the University of Maine.
Brenda’s upcoming Neva Pierce series features a criminal defense lawyer who’s inherited her father’s enormous solo practice but none of his fast-talking, hard-knuckled ways.
Early in her legal career Brenda did some criminal defense work, none of which was quite as thrilling as the cases on Neva Pierce’s caseload. These days she rarely sets foot inside a courthouse and is neither as young nor as intrepid as Neva Pierce. That said, in 35 years practicing law she’s had the good fortune to interact with many fascinating real-life characters, giving her a wealth of material to create fictional heroes and villains.
Crime writing allows her to make things up, a pleasure she has been denied in the fact-bound worlds of journalism and law.
Brenda resides near Portland, Maine with her spouse, Diane Kenty.
