Martin J. Smith, 53, is a veteran journalist and magazine editor who has won more than 40 newspaper and magazine writing awards. A former senior editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, he currently is editor-in-chief of Orange Coast, the market-leading monthly magazine of Orange County, Calif. He also is the co-author, with Patrick J. Kiger, of OOPS: 20 Life Lessons From the Fiascoes That Shaped America, which Publishers Weekly called "as informative as it is entertaining," and POPLORICA: A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore That Shaped Modern America (HarperResource, 2004), now in paperback, about which PW concluded: “All history should be this much fun.”

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he began writing professionally while a student at Pennsylvania State University in the late 1970s. His 15-year career as a newspaper reporter took him around the world, from the rural poverty of Southwestern Pennsylvania to Nevada’s Mustang Ranch bordello; from the riot-torn streets of Los Angeles to the revolutionary streets of Manila; from pre-glasnost Siberia to the new frontier of cyberspace.

His Anthony Award-nominated first novel, Time Release (Jove, 1997), featured memory expert Jim Christensen and examined the volatile issue of repressed memories against the backdrop of a sensational product-tampering case. The story, set in Pittsburgh, was conceived as the 10th anniversary of the infamous Tylenol killings neared and inspired by a rash of repressed-memory prosecutions during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Those cases caused considerable controversy in the psychological and law-enforcement communities.

In Shadow Image (Jove, 1998), a sequel inspired both by the plight of former President Ronald Reagan and the JonBenet Ramsey murder case in Colorado, Christensen is drawn into the labyrinth of Alzheimer’s disease and a complex web of lies created by one of Pennsylvania’s wealthiest and most powerful political families. The story begins when family matriarch Floss Underhill apparently attempts suicide just as her only son begins his ascent to the governor’s mansion.

Straw Men (Jove, 2001), the third book in Smith’s “Memory Series” and a 2002 Edgar Award and Barry Award nominee, begins when DNA evidence frees an unpredictable and disfigured young man known as the Scarecrow eight years after he was convicted of a vicious sexual attack. The new evidence forces the woman whose testimony put him behind bars to confront memories that are violent, vivid—and apparently wrong. Only Christensen, her one-time nemesis, can pull the truth from her shattered mind before the man who left her for dead can finish the job. Best-selling author Barbara Seranella called Christensen “a wonderfully unique sleuth [who] tackles the most mysterious setting of all: the Bermuda Triangle of human memory,” and Edgar Award winner Laura Lippman called Straw Men “the creepiest good time I’ve had in ages.”

Smith lives with his wife and their two children in Southern California. He currently is working on a new novel and another nonfiction book.