Glad to see you jumped right in.

Here's a little information about patricia:

The China Conspiracy is the second suspense thriller in a series that casts female programmers in the lead roles—women who find themselves caught in life or death situations where they must use their knowledge and their guts to rescue themselves.

"I always have admired strong women," Patricia admits. "I think it came from listening to my father tell us stories about our ancestry, and all the strong women in our family. One ancestor, Paralee Drake, was left at home during the Civil War when her husband joined the Confederate Army. When a group of Union soldiers tried to steal the hams from the smokehouse, she stood in the doorway with her shotgun, and told them those hams were all she had to feed her seven children, and they would get to them over her dead body. Legend has it, they left her, her children and the hams alone."

It's the kind of guts the characters in her books would admire.

Reviews:

Editor Rebecca Brown (http://www.rebeccasreads.com/reviews/11mysthr/11terp33.html) says: “p.m.terrell, author of the wildly successful Kickback, is back with another hair-raising, fast-paced thriller pitting a savvy programmer, a TV news reporter with a painful past, & an enigmatic Chinese-American translator against a dogged police inspector, a newly elected politician & the shadow men of the CIA & FBI… With a nod to The Manchurian Candidate, this modern caper comes out the gate at a gallop, & keeps you hurtling through winter storms & burrowing into the mazes of a shell company, moments before the killers, inches in front of certain disaster.”

Reviewer Deborah Hern (http://www.theromancereadersconnection.com/reviews/terrellpm1503.html): “This exciting story takes off from the very first page and never lets up for a moment. The pace is fast, the plotting excellent, and the characters are human and believable. The evolving relationship between Kit and Carter seems very natural, never strained. The secondary characters moving in and out of the story are all well-drawn and add intrigue to the mix. My advice: Don’t start this one late at night. You’ll find yourself feverishly turning pages long into the wee hours.”

Patricia Terrell, a Boomer Woman who writes under the pen name p.m.terrell, was born in Washington, DC to an FBI Special Agent and his homemaker wife, the third of five children. Although they lived for short periods throughout the country, Trish (as she prefers to be called) is a native Washingtonian who has lived most of her life in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.
Her life, like the novels she writes, took a series of different twists and turns. Until recent years, her writing took a back seat to marriage, raising a family, and earning a living. Through a stroke of luck (or some would say, fate) she was working for a subsidiary of IBM when the first Apple computers rolled off the production lines, and she found herself on the ground floor of a mushrooming industry.
In 1984, when she was known as Patricia McClelland, she opened her first business, McClelland Enterprises, Inc. It was one of the first companies in the Washington, DC metropolitan area that was devoted entirely to personal computer classroom instruction. She personally wrote all of the course manuals that were used in the classes. During this period, three of her computer how-to books were also published: Creating the Perfect Database, published by Scott-Foresman, followed by The Dynamics of WordPerfect and The Dynamics of Reflex, both published by Dow Jones-Irwin. She also wrote a series of columns for The Washington Business Advisor, The Washington Post, and The Washington Business Journal, among others.

Ten years later, she became Patricia McClelland Terrell, and opened her second business, Terrell Computer Services, Inc., which is now known as Continental Software Development Corporation, USA.

Trish is a strong supporter of Crime Solvers, Crime Stoppers, and Crime Lines. She served as the first female President of the Chesterfield/ Colonial Heights Crime Solvers, breaking through the glass ceiling to chair a board that had previously been firmly managed by a “good old boys” network. “It was not a job for the faint of heart,” Trish says laughingly. Using her background in computers, she took the organization into the 21st Century, including establishing a web site that receives almost a quarter million hits per month and has earned a link from America’s Most Wanted.

On April 1, 2004 she was with Virginia Governor Mark Warner when he signed into legislation additional protection for citizens calling Crime Solvers and Crime Stoppers with tips. It ensures that citizens will remain anonymous and can not be called to testify in court.

Although Trish wrote stories growing up, she set aside her literary pursuits until 2000, when she wrote her first published suspense/thriller, Kickback. She’d been working as a programmer and had developed an application for a trucking firm when they approached her and asked her to add a routine that effectively hid their under-the-table kickbacks.

“I was the worst programmer in the world for them to ask,” she says, laughing. “I went straight home and called my dad, who is a retired FBI Special Agent.” He put her in contact with the local FBI field office, and she turned over evidence to them of the kickback scheme.

“As time went by,” she says, “I wondered what would have happened if the FBI hadn’t believed me… or if the trucking company threatened my life.” So the idea for Kickback was formed, in which a much younger programmer enters her first job, right out of college, only to find they want her to write a program to hide illegal kickbacks. Only in this story, the FBI don’t believe her and the closer the main character gets to gathering evidence of illegal activities, the closer the bad guys get to ending her life.

During the 2000 Presidential election, Trish was having lunch with two of her computer clients when they began discussing the problem of hanging, pregnant, and dimpled chads. “I argued that the U.S. would have to computerize the elections; we had come so far technologically that it didn’t make sense to continue with old-fashioned paper ballots with punch holes. But as I thought about it, I realized how easy it would be to “fix” an election if it was computerized.”

So once Kickback was finished, she started on The China Conspiracy. And as The China Conspiracy was hitting the bookshelves, Johns Hopkins University led a study into the real computerized touch-screen technology used by many states in the 2004 election. And their findings were chilling: that the new technology was so security flawed, “even a foreign government could easily infiltrate the system and rig our elections.” The China Conspiracy has received international attention, including segments broadcast into Communist China by Voice of America and a thirty-minute PBS television show.

In August 2004, Trish combined her literary pursuits with her law enforcement connections to co-found The Book ‘Em Foundation (www.bookemfoundation.org), a non-profit organization, whose mission is to increase public awareness of the connection between high illiteracy rates and high crime rates, increase literacy rates, and decrease crime rates. They held the First Annual Book 'Em Event on October 23, 2004 in Waynesboro, Virginia, which featured 48 authors who signed their books and participated in talks and discussions. Proceeds from the event went to literacy projects and decreasing crime. The event was so successful the City of Waynesboro signed a 20-year agreement (the first in its history) to have the Book ‘Em Event held in their town every October. The next event is scheduled for October 22-23, 2005.

Trish is currently working on her third suspense/thriller, Ricochet, which is due out later this year. She has two more suspense/thrillers scheduled after that. And her agent is currently negotiating the movie rights to both Kickback and The China Conspiracy. You can view more information about her and her books at www.pmterrell.com.