David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway Scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph. D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

That "father" of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the influential spy trilogy, The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries broadcast after the Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog. 

Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell's life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character has lost a son.

"The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions," as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-one books, including such high-action thrillers as The Fifth Profession, Assumed Identity, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series, Captain America: The Chosen. His The Successful Novelist:  A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing analyzes what he has learned during his almost four decades as an author.

Morrell is a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers. Comic-Con International honored him with its legendary Inkpot Award for his contributions to popular culture.
 
His latest novel is The Spy Who Came for Christmas. Visit him at http://www.davidmorrell.net.

Sandra Brown is the author of fifty-five New York Times bestsellers, including Richocet (starred review Publisher's Weekly), which was released in August 2006 by Simon & Schuster. Her other recent bestsellers include Chill Factor (2005), White Hot (2004), Hello, Darkness (2003), The Crush (2002), Envy (2001), The Switch (2000), The Alibi (1999), Unspeakable (1998) and Fat Tuesday (1997), all of which have jumped onto the Times bestseller list in the number one to five spot. Her latest book is Play Dirty.

Brown began her writing career in 1981 and since then has published sixty-eight novels, most of which remain in print. As of 1990, when Mirror Image made The New York Times bestseller list, each subsequent novel, including reprints of earlier books, have become Times bestsellers. In 1992 her novel French Silk was made into an ABC-TV movie. Brown now has seventy million copies of her books in print worldwide, and her work has been translated into thirty-three languages.

A lifelong Texan, Sandra Brown was born in Waco, grew up in Fort Worth and attended Texas Christian University, majoring in English. Before embarking on her writing career, Sandra worked in television - including weathercasting and feature reporting on the nationally syndicated program "PM Magazine."

Awards and commendations include the 2007 Texas Medal of Arts Award for Literature, the American Business Women's Association's Distinguished Circle of Success, B'nai B'rith's Distinguished Literary Achievement Award, and the Romance Writers of America's Lifetime Achievement Award. She is also a member of Author's Guild, Mystery Writers of America, Novelists, Inc., Literacy Partners, and a founding member of International Thriller Writers.

Sandra and her husband Michael Brown live in Arlington, Texas. Visit her on the web at http://www.sandrabrown.com.

Clive Cussler is acclaimed worldwide as the Grandmaster of Adventure. He got his start in advertising, first as an award-winning copy writer, and then as creative director for two of the nation's largest agencies. His initial foray into fiction was in 1973, when he wrote his first Dirk Pitt® novel.

Since then he has continued to write Dirk Pitt® adventures while living a life that nearly parallels that of his action hero. Like Pitt, Cussler enjoys discovering and collecting things of historical significance.

 

With NUMA (National Underwater & Marine Agency, a non profit group begun by Cussler) he has had an amazing record of finding shipwrecks. Cussler and his crew of marine experts and NUMA volunteers have discovered over 60 historically significant underwater wreck sites. After verifying their finds, NUMA turns the rights to the artifacts over to non-profits, universities, or government entities all over the world. Some of these finds include the C.S.S. Hunley, best known as the first submarine to sink a ship in battle; the Housatonic, the ship the Hunley sank; the U-20, the U-boat that sank the Lusitania; the Cumberland, sunk by the famous ironclad, Merrimack; the Carpathia, the valiant ship that braved icebergs to rescue the survivors of the Titanic; and others others of historical significance. 

In addition to being Chairman of NUMA, Cussler is a fellow in both the Explorers Club of New York, the Royal Geographic Society in London, and the American Society of Oceanographers. He has also been honored with the Lowell Thomas Award for outstanding underwater exploration. Cussler also has a renowned and extensive classic car collection, which features over 80 examples of custom coachwork.

 

His latest release is Medusa, featuring the NUMA® Special Assignments Team. 

Married to Barbara Knight for 40 years, with three children and two grandchildren, he divides his time between the mountains of Colorado and the deserts of Arizona. Learn more about his books and about current shipwreck expeditions at /http://www.numa.net/clive_cussler.html.

 

Spotlight Guest Robin Cook

Doctor and author Robin Cook is widely credited with introducing the word "medical" to the thriller genre, and thirty one years after the publication of his breakthrough novel, Coma, he continues to dominate the category he created.  Cook has successfully combined medical fact with fantasy to produce a succession of twenty-six New York Times bestsellers that have been translated into forty languages. To date, they include Outbreak (1987), Mindbend (1988), Mutation (1989), Harmful Intent (1990), Vital Signs (1991), Blindsight (1992), Terminal (1993), Fatal Cure (1994), Acceptable Risk (1995), Contagion (1996), Chromosome 6 (1997), Toxin (1998), Vector (1999), Shock (2001), Seizure (2003), Marker (2005), Crisis (2006) and Critical (2007). His latest novel is Foreign Body.

In each of his novels, Robin Cook strives to elucidate various medical/biotech ethical issues.  Dr. Cook says he chose to write thrillers as a way to use entertainment as a method of exposing the public to public policy conundrums such as genetic engineering, medical economics, in vitro fertilization, research funding, managed care, drug research, organ transplantation, stem cell research, concierge medicine, and M.D.-owned specialty hospitals. In Foreign Body, Cook explores a growing trend of medical tourism - first-world citizens traveling to third-world countries for 21st Century surgery.

There have been numerous theatrical movies, television movies, and mini-series made from Robin Cook's work. In addition to the successful feature film Coma, in December 1993, CBS-TV aired "Robin Cook's Harmful Intent"; in November 1994 NBC-TV aired "Robin Cook's Mortal Fear"; in May 1995, NBC-TV aired "Robin Cook's Virus," based on Outbreak; in February 1996 NBC-TV aired "Robin Cook's Terminal"; in 1997 NBC-TV aired "Robin Cook's Invasion"; and in October 2001 TNT-TV aired "Robin Cook's Acceptable Risk".

Robin Cook is a graduate of Columbia University Medical School and finished his postgraduate medical training at Harvard. He is currently on leave from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he now works and lives in Florida. Dr. Cook's hobbies mainly involve interior and architectural design, period renovation, and athletics including basketball, tennis, skiing, and when waves are accessible, surfing. Visit him on the web at http://tinyurl.com/4koekn.

Spotlight Guest Katherine Neville

Katherine Neville's 20-year career as an international computer executive and consultant, principally in the fields of finance and energy, took her to live and work in six countries on three continents and half of the states in the U.S.  She numbered among her clients and employers IBM, the Bank of America, OPEC, and the US Department of Energy. Katherine did her post-graduate studies in African Literature. She has worked as a commercial photographer, portrait painter, busboy, waiter, and model, and she draws from all these work experiences to enrich her novels.

Katherine's books The Eight, A Calculated Risk, and The Magic Circle are bestsellers in more than thirty languages. Her colorful adventure-quest-thriller novels are hard to categorize. She has been described as the female Umberto Eco, the female Alexander Dumas, and the female Stephen Spielberg. Publishers Weekly has recently (Spring 2008) described her books as having paved the way for books like The Da Vinci Code.  In a national poll by the noted journal El Pais, in Spain, The Eight was voted one of the top ten books of all time.

Her latest novel The Fire is a long-anticipated sequel to The Eight.

Katherine has been a guest or speaker at interesting venues around the world including the Today show; Publishers Weekly; Voice of America; National Public Radio; The Georgia Tech Women's Leadership Conference; the Edgar Allan Poe and the Agatha Christie Awards; The Ateneo de Madrid; the Turkish Culture Ministry in Ankara and the First International Rumi Symposium in Konya, Turkey; The Smithsonian in Washington D.C.; and the World Affairs Conference in Boulder, CO.

Katherine is an annual co-chair of the Authors Guild Foundation banquet in New York, and she is on the cabinet or director's circle of a number of noted institutions such as the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of American Art, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Poplar Forest. She is a sponsoring founder of the International Thriller Writers.

Katherine lives with Dr. Karl Pribram in Virginia, Washington DC and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Visit her on the web at http://www.katherineneville.com.

2008 Silver Bullet Award Recipient David Baldacci

David Baldacci was the recipient of ITW's 2008 Silver Bullet Award. He's returning this year to present the 2009 award to the as-yet-undetermined recipient.

The Silver Bullet Award was created by the International Thriller Writers to recognize outstanding and meritorious achievement in the pursuit of literacy and the love of reading. Recipients are chosen on an annual basis representing the corporate, literary and entertainment worlds. Past recipients of the Silver Bullet Award include authors Sandra Brown and R.L. Stine, publisher Tom Doherty, actor Tony Plana (Ugly Betty), the Nestle Company, and Capital One.

David Baldacci was born in Virginia, in 1960, where he currently resides. He received a Bachelor of Arts in political science from Virginia Commonwealth University and a law degree from the University of Virginia. Mr. Baldacci practiced law for nine years in Washington, D.C., as both a trial and corporate attorney.

David Baldacci has published an astonishing string of novels, all of them national and international bestsellers: Absolute Power, Total Control, The Winner, The Simple Truth, Saving Faith, Wish You Well, Last Man Standing, The Christmas Train, Split Second, Hour Game, The Camel Club, The Collectors, Simple Genius, Stone Cold, and The Whole Truth; and a young adult series. Castle Rock entertainment made Absolute Power into a major motion picture starring Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman. His books have been translated into more than 45 languages and sold in more than 80 countries. Over 60 million copies of his books are in print worldwide.

Mr. Baldacci contributes to, and is involved in, several philanthropic efforts. His greatest efforts are currently dedicated to his family's own Wish You Well Foundation. Learn more about these organizations and others below. Visit him on the web at http://www.davidbaldacci.com.

The Wish You Well Foundation, established by Michelle and David Baldacci, supports family literacy in the United States by fostering and promoting the development and expansion of new and existing literacy and educational programs. For more information, call 703-476-6032.

The mission of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy is to establish literacy as a value in every family in America by helping every family in the nation understand that the home is the child's first school, that the parent is the child's first teacher, and that reading is the child's first subject. The foundation also seeks to break the inter-generational cycle of illiteracy by supporting the development of family literacy programs where parents and children can learn and read together. For more information, call (202) 955-6183.

Since 1955, the mission of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation is to assure the development of the means to cure and control cystic fibrosis and to improve the quality of life for those with the disease. Through grants, medical research, and patient support systems, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation helps thousands of people each year to manage this life-impacting disease. For more information, call (800) FIGHT-CF (800-344-4823).

The National Multiple Sclerosis Society is dedicated to ending the devastating effects of multiple sclerosis. For the past 53 years, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society has invested more than $260 million to find the cause, treatments and cure for this chronic, often disabling disease of the central nervous system.  Research continues with new medicines and treatments for MS, as well as advancements in patient care. For more information, call (800) FIGHT-MS (800-344-4867).

The National Childhood Cancer Foundation supports a network of childhood cancer programs at institutions throughout North America, and in Australia and Europe, that conduct ground-breaking laboratory research and give state-of-the-art care to infants, children, teens, and young adults with cancer. For more information, call (800) 458-6223.

The Virginia Literacy Foundation works to advance adult literacy through programs and individual adult education. Thousands of volunteers each year give their time and talents to aid adults to strengthen their reading and comprehension skills. For more information, call (804) 255-8777.