Karen Hall

Karen Hall, an environmental engineer and writer, lives in the Black Hills outside Rapid City, SD, with her husband Jeff Nelsen and their cat, Junior. Though she earned a Bachelor's Degree at the University of Minnesota, she validated Garrison Keillor's notions about English majors by trying lots of professions, none of them teaching, for which she feels she's not suited. None of those early jobs fit her well, so she went back to school for degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering, and spent many years working in Minnesota's oil industry. She left to start her own environmental consulting business--and to devote more time to writing. Her first novel, UNREASONABLE RISK (2006), is an environmental thriller about sabotage in an oil refinery, and features series protagonist Hannah Morrison. The second in the series, THROUGH DARK SPACES (2012), is set in the hard rock gold mining industry of South Dakota's Black Hills. Karen is currently finishing a novel about infertility and working on the third Hannah Morrison mystery, set in the Bakken oilfields of western North Dakota, the closest thing America currently has to the wild west. Ms. Hall has also published several short stories and travel pieces.