Susan Kraus

I'm Susan --- or Suze or Mom or Honey or "Hey you..."---

I grew up in N.J. across the GW Bridge from NYC.  Went to St. Mary's Elementary School, then Northern Valley High, where I excelled in being geeky and invisible. (To be invisible, it helps to always have your face buried in a book, a skill I perfected.) Then Montclair State, majoring in English and Education (to teach HS.) Then California State University at Chico, for an MA in English. Then University of Texas at Austin in the Ph.D program in English--- which I dropped out of (only after completing all the classes for the Ph.D.) and moved across campus to Social Work. Turns out I really like listening to people's stories and helping them rewrite their 'life-stories.'  I studied to be a therapist, also a custody mediator. 40+ years of listening to stories, of seeing how lives can change direction, informs very chapter of every book. I do not write just psych thriller, or mystery, or romance, or socially conscious--- but each of these manifest in every book I've written. It's hard to predict when and where as my characters direct the process. I am telling their stories. They are real. 

I wrote my first novel when raising kids and working full-time, which meant early-early mornings and stolen evenings to write. It took 3-4 years.  Travel articles, book reviews, columns? Sure, those I could churn out, mostly because they were short and had deadlines. But a novel? Then it went into a drawer for 14 years. (It was a deep drawer.) But the characters kept nagging me, poking at me, until I wrote a second , and then a third, and then a fourth. 

My novels are genre-busters, meticulously researched fiction grounded in facts. My first novel is a mystery/thriller with a young wife who needs to get out of a marriage with a gaslighting man (this was a decade  before 'gaslighting' was a familiar term) and a therapist who is framed for .... (Oh, just read it.)  #2  was a custody battle over a kid in the gay-bashing, funeral-picketing Westboro Baptist Church.  Novel #3  tackles how pick-up culture made campus rape almost impossible to prosecute, and two young women who go rogue. #4 explores COVID in a Kansas university town, from front-line medical to Zoom romance to grief when the person you loved is just a statistic... to QAnon and DMORT (nobody knows that that is but you will). And a lot more. This last one, When We Lost Touch, is a saga.