A
native of North Carolina, Stephen graduated from Virginia Military
Institute and obtained a master's degree from the University of
British Columbia. Miller is a writer and actor, living in Canada
with his wife and son.
In Miller's debut mystery, The Woman in the Yard,
Q.P. Waldeau, known as Kewpie, is a Korean War vet looking for
a job in law enforcement. Turned down by big city police departments,
he accepts the post of acting sheriff of New Hanover County, where
race relations remain strained despite recent advances. When a
young black prostitute, Cora Snow, turns up on the local beach
trussed and savagely murdered, Kewpie is the only person in the
white community who seems to care. It takes the similar killing
of another black woman, then of a white woman, before the crimes
get major attention. By then, Kewpie and Nina Mendelson, a liberal
librarian who left Wilmington in disgust but has returned to look
after her dying father, have begun to uncover an upper-class white
male conspiracy. Kewpie, reluctantly running for re-election,
also has to worry about nightmares relating to his time in Korea,
the pain of a recently failed relationship, and a threatening
hurricane. A stylish writer who creates believable characters
moving against a well-detailed, atmospheric background, Miller
makes a welcome entrance to the field.
"The Woman in the Yard is a stunning first
novel--richly textured, historically valid, accented by eye-popping
explosive scenes and brilliant insights. Stephen Miller has raised
the Southern cop genre to a new level."
Jack Olsen,
best-selling author of Salt of the Earth and Hastened to the Grave
St. Martin's Press US and Canada
Stephen’s
latest novel A Game of Soldiers (published
in Canada as The Field of Mars), is
a thriller set in Russia just before the First World War.
HarperCollins UK
Penguin Canada Wydawnictwo Helion S.A.