Woman Who Knew Too Much

First in the Cordelia Morgan Mystery series

In the New Mexico "outback," someone is experimenting with a new designer drug developed to give fellows a little boost, if some of its nasty side effects can be removed. Enter Cordelia Morgan, on a routine assignment that turns out to be anything but. Jet Butler has lived on an isolated mesa for more than twenty years ever since her feminist bestseller indirectly caused the deaths of eighty-three women and children living in a commune during an FBI-bungled siege. Now her best friend and next-door neighbor, Kit, is the prime suspect in the murder of a local recluse, a man Jet ranks as the single most unlikeable human being she's ever met. Enter Cord Morgan. She's a hit artist for The Company, an international "contracting" firm. Morgan is a few years past the ten-year limit prescribed for her line of work. The Company, sensing the beginning of a crack or two, gives her an easy vacation assignment in rural New Mexico. But when she meets up with Jet Butler, her facade really begins to crack and Cordelia Morgan finds herself on the run.

Bett Reece Johnson was born on August 3, 1945 in Fountainhead, Tennessee. ("Actually, it's not even a 'town,' at least it didn't used to be; there's only a hospital there that I was born in actually, a sanitarium, but hospitals were scarce in the area, so women went there to have babies. Used to make my mother crazy when I told people I was born in a mental institution. She never had much use for literal truths.")

After her parents divorced in 1950, she moved to Indiana where her mother remarried a man who raised race horses. In the 60s, Johnson "worked at office jobs till I used up the sick pay, then found another." She went to beauty school and worked as a hairdresser in Indianapolis, Miami Beach, then California.

"Feeling inchoate biological clock (as termed these days); decided to have child. Spent some time looking for right genetic material-I've a poor memory, mainly; my creative writing teacher was not only a gifted writer, but when he quoted HOWL in entirety while driving breakneck through the streets of San Francisco, I knew I'd found a match." Her daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1972.

Johnson went on to earn a scholarship to the University of California at Riverside, where she entered the Ph.D. program in English Literature. She taught English in New Mexico ("Las Vegas, NM-a town so wild it was on the cover of TIME MAGAZINE one year ") and California ("After New Mexico, nothing ever looks quite the same. Like having your eyes scrubbed with acid: after the blindness, clarity.") Finally, in the mid-90s, Johnson left academia and moved back to rural New Mexico where she wrote THE WOMAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH.