Paula McLain

Fourteen years in the California foster system sit behind Paula McLain's fiction. Born in Fresno in 1965, she and her two sisters became wards of the state after their mother left and their father went to jail, and she supported herself in a convalescent hospital, an auto plant and a cocktail bar before taking an MFA in poetry at Michigan in 1996. Two poetry collections and the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People's Houses preceded her novels. Love and Ruin follows the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn from her arrival in Madrid in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War through her marriage to Ernest Hemingway, keeping Gellhorn in the foreground and her famous husband off to one side. When the Stars Go Dark turns to crime fiction: Detective Anna Hart retreats to Mendocino in 1993 and works a case of missing girls against the real backdrop of the Polly Klaas abduction. McLain lives in Ohio.