I am the author of four award-winning books inspired by my lifelong love affair with France and French culture—an affection that began fifty years ago when I sailed to Paris as a Northwestern University junior to study at the Sorbonne.

Over the years, I’ve lived several rich and varied lives. I was a wife and mother in suburban New Jersey, tutoring French and exhibiting my paintings in local art shows. Later, I became a small-group tour operator, escorting travelers to France and India around the time of my divorce in Florida. (While I never had a torrid affair with a French bus driver, my fictional alter ego certainly did.)

After my divorce, I bought an 18th-century farmhouse in a tiny French hamlet—“needs work” being an understatement—and pursued new adventures in Paris and the provinces, searching for a fun Monsieur Right while redefining myself in the process. Back in Florida, I opened a small art gallery to showcase my paintings inspired by the French countryside. There, I met an American man—unexpectedly not French—whose rough edges turned out to be exactly right. Together we traded the farmhouse for a medieval townhouse in a nearby Michelin-starred village and immersed ourselves in village life, at least as summer residents.

Our idyllic transatlantic life lasted ten years before illness and loss brought me back to New York to be closer to my grown sons. Eventually, I found love again with a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker who now shares summers with me in France—affectionately dubbed “numéro deux” by the locals.

Today, whether I’m in my apartment overlooking the Manhattan skyline or on my terrace in rural France gazing toward the Pyrenees, I reflect on a life that has been full of reinvention, romance, and cross-cultural adventure. Painting once absorbed my creative energy, but writing proved less physically demanding and equally exhilarating. And some of my paintings are featured on the covers of my books and in pen & ink illustrations.

The result of my change of focus is French Lessons, followed by the art mystery series which includes Vanished, Missing and Lost. My books blend nostalgia, mystery, and romance—proof that life’s later chapters can be the most interesting of all.