“Kit Ehrman grew up a mile from the Baltimore City line not a likely place for a "horse person." Ehrman was working for the government and going to college part time when she happened to come across a copy of Dick Francis's IN THE FRAME. Afterwards, she read every one of his mysteries that she could get her hands on, quit the government job, and went to work on a horse farm in Howard County, Maryland.
Ehrman became a barn manager almost immediately, moved around a bit, worked at the track for a brief time, then moved to Pennsylvania and worked on a breeding farm, delivering foals on the night shift. Later, she returned to college and earned extra money buying small horse farms, upgrading them, and selling them for a profit. While mucking stalls, Ehrman got into the habit of making up stories in her head, thinking about characters and plot lines and bad guys.
“There's lots of time to go through the 'What if's?'" she says. "Like, what if I went to work early one morning and found a bunch of horses gone? Or worse, what if the thieves were still there? What would I do?" One thing led to another, and Ehrman started putting her ideas on paper. Those ideas evolved into the Steve Cline Mystery series which follows the adventures of Steve Cline, a young man who grew up privileged and wealthy but finds himself alone in the world and penniless at the age of twenty-one. From the fancy hunters and show jumpers that display their prowess as they soar over challenging obstacles to the sleek, often high-strung, thoroughbreds that compete at the racetrack, the horses are as integral to the story as the mysteries themselves.
Many of Ehrman's experiences, impressions, and observations are reflected in the stories. For example, while she was working foal watch at a huge breeding farm in Pennsylvania, a serial arsonist was burning down vacant barns in the surrounding neighbourhoods. To this day, she still remembers how spooky it felt to look down the barn aisle around two in the morning, see an orange glow on the horizon, and know another barn was burning. That incident kicks off the third book in the series, COLD BURN.
AT RISK is Ehrman's debut novel, a Steve Cline mystery that takes place in Maryland's horse country where managing a show barn can be murder. The second in the series, DEAD MAN'S TOUCH, was released in November 2003, and COLD BURN followed in 2005 and became a ForeWord Magazine Book-of-the-Year Bronze Winner and an Independent Publishers IPPY AWARD Finalist. TRIPLE CROSS came out in December '06. Published by Poisoned Pen Press, this award-winning series has received outstanding reviews in The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, The Denver Post, and Chicago Tribune among others.
Ehrman is a member of Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, Inc., and Sisters in Crime. Kit lives and writes on a horse farm near Columbus, Indiana.”
