 Mercedes
Lambert is Douglas Anne Munson.
Douglas Anne Munson is Mercedes Lambert.
Born in Crossville, Tennessee on February
17, 1948, Douglas Anne Munson's childhood was
spent moving from town to town before her family
finally settled in southern California in the
1960s. Douglas attended the University of New
Mexico, where she majored in Latin American studies,
and lived for a year in Ecuador. After attending
law school at UCLA, Douglas became an attorney
in the Los Angeles criminal courts. Most of her
legal career was spent in dependency court, where
children who have been removed from their parent's
custody because of severe abuse, neglect or abandonment
move through the legal system.
In 1990, Douglas published a
novel called El Niño. The book
was well received by critics and Douglas went
on to publish two mystery novels under the name
of Mercedes Lambert, Dogtown in 1991
and Soultown in 1996, which featured
two women detectives. She completed a third novel
in the series, Ghosttown, which remained
unpublished during her lifetime.
After leaving the legal profession, Douglas taught
creative writing and journaling at UCLA. She lived
briefly in Washington State and San Francisco,
and after completing a program to teach English
as a second language, moved to the Czech Republic
where she taught English to soldiers, missionaries,
and mink farmers. After being diagnosed with cancer
(she had successfully fought breast cancer while
writing El Niño in the late 1980s),
Douglas returned to the United States in 2001
and sought medical treatment in Connecticut. She
was able to make one last visit to the Czech Republic
in December of 2003 before dying on December 22,
2003 at a hospital in Norwalk, Connecticut.
Her
ashes were returned to southern California where
they were scattered at sea.
Four
years after her death, Ghosttown, the
third and final Whitney Logan mystery, was published
by Five Star Mystery; in the Spring of 2008, the
first two Whitney Logan mysteries—Dogtown
and Soultown—were reprinted in
a single edition by Stark House. With the resurgence
of interest of Douglas Anne Munson, her books
have been translated and published in Japan and
Italy. |
