Twisted Truths

"I'm an excitement junkie for one thing," says Nancy Taylor Rosenberg. "I'm always out there fighting for justice, for victims, and will do anything to get the guilty punished and the innocent protected."

Rosenberg's protagonist, Carolyn Sullivan, feels the same way.

In Revenge of Innocents, the fourth book in the Carolyn Sullivan series, probation officer Sullivan's job turns too personal when the officer's best childhood friend is murdered. Determined to find the killer, Sullivan heads down a path of twisted truths as she uncovers how little she really knew about her old friend.

Drawing from real life experience to write this series, Rosenberg was one of the first women to come out of the Dallas Police Academy in the 1970s when the women's movement was evolving. She started out as a policewoman patrolling the streets. (Today she would be called a police officer.) She then worked her way through various departments until she became a department probation officer.

"That's where I refined my writing skills," she says, "writing 24-page reports, interviewing offenders and victims—-if they were alive," she says, "and if not, then I talked with next of kin."

Rosenberg says she developed a reputation and gained respect for her work from the judges. "Someone once quipped that I could write somebody into prison," she says. "Every sentence I recommended to the judge was imposed."

Then, in 1990, she was thrown from a horse. Rosenberg almost lost her ability to walk. She channeled her writing skills into fiction and wrote her first novel: Mitigating Circumstances, launching a new career. The 1993 debut novel became a New York Times bestseller. Academy award winning director, Jonathan Demme, bought film rights.

These days, probation officers make $75-$80 grand and is a pretty good job," Rosenberg says. "You're usually not shot. You might get locked in a tiny cell with a murderer or rapist"—-yes, that happened to Rosenberg—-" but everything in my life has always worked out," she says. "Writing is a wonderful catharsis."

Revenge of Innocents is the fourth book in Nancy Taylor Rosenberg's Carolyn Sullivan series. The other three in the series are also coming out in paperback this month: Sullivan's Law, Sullivan's Justice, and Sullivan's Evidence. Rosenberg has appeared on Prime Time Live, The Today Show and Entertainment Tonight.