Kay Finch

Kay Finch is a Pennsylvania native but, as her husband likes to say, she got to Texas as fast as she could. She has worked as a legal assistant in Houston for the past seventeen years, beginning in the criminal law arena at Richard "Racehorse" Haynes’ firm before turning to a specialization in family law. Kay meets with clients at one of the worst, most emotional, times of their lives. Though the typical clients are law-abiding citizens, to the best of her knowledge, it’s not hard to imagine them each with a motive for murder. And so the Corie McKenna series was born, beginning with Final Decree, a novel sparked by one particularly memorable client many years ago.

Mysteries have been a part of Kay’s life from the time she wrote as a child, illustrating the covers of her manuscripts in crayon on colorful paper. Growing up on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, there were no neighborhood kids to share these stories with so she kept her treasures to herself, secret papers stashed in a dresser drawer. She fondly remembers handing in creative writing assignments in eighth grade using the pseudonym April Holiday on her work.

Kay is a member of Mystery Writers of America’s Southwest Chapter, Sisters in Crime, and the State Bar of Texas Legal Assistants Division. She was 1 of 10 finalists selected from 702 entries in MWA’s Golden Mysteries short story competition in 1995, and her winning story "Firm Expectations" went on to publication in Red Herring Mystery Magazine, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1996. She won first place in the mystery manuscript contest at Houston Writer’s Conference in 1998. She lives with her husband in a Houston, Texas suburb, and when she isn’t writing, she’s reading, playing piano, or doling out attention to their four Labrador retrievers and two cats.