Biography

A few years ago Rebecca Cantrell quit her job, sold her house, and moved to Hawaii to write a novel because, at seven, she decided that she would be a writer. Now she has a two book deal from Tor/Forge for a mystery series set in Berlin in the 1930s. “A Trace of Smoke” is due out in the May 2009, and “A Night of Long Knives” is due out May 2010. “A Trace of Smoke” was considered by major cable networks as a television series. Her screenplay “A Taste For Blood” was a finalist at the Shriekfest 2007: The Los Angeles Horror/Sci-fi Film Festival. She has also published short stories and essays.

Rebecca Cantrell bought her first typewriter with babysitting money at age thirteen. Since then, she has written novels, screenplays, and short stories about the Alaskan wilderness, Berlin before and after the wall, and dot com Silicon Valley. She has also written many technical manuals. “A Trace of Smoke” is her first published novel. As of this writing, she lives in Hawaii with her husband and son.

“A Trace of Smoke” was inspired by a faded pink triangle pasted on the wall of Dachau Concentration Camp and her time in Berlin, Germany in the 1980s. Fluent in German, she received her high school diploma from the John F. Kennedy Schule in Berlin and studied at the Freie Universität in Berlin and the Georg August Universität in Göttingen.

When she visited Berlin in the summer of 2006, she was astounded to discover that many locations in her novel have been rebuilt and reopened in the last few years, including the gay bar El Dorado and the Mosse House publishing house.