My name is Maria Lynn Barrs, writing as ML Barrs. Writing mysteries is a natural culmination of my life experiences.

Like my protagonist, Vicky, I started as a TV reporter, then ran television newsrooms in markets large and small. TV news is adrenaline-fueled, constantly changing, charged with conflict and emotion. I led teams covering everything from the September 11th attacks and devastating storms like Katrina, to major elections and sports championships. Our focus was always on how people were affected. The hardest stories for me were those that involved harm to children.

At the heart of my debut novel, Parallel Secrets, is a search for belonging amid tragedy—and the heavy toll secrets take. As Vicky unearths long-hidden secrets in her search for a kidnapped girl, she is forced to face the searing pain of her own past. She became fiercely independent at an early age, which now leads to struggle in her budding love relationship with the enticing Pete Harris.

Everyone’s past lives within them. I’m one of thirteen children. My mom was a fervently Catholic immigrant from the Philippines, my father an artist who grew up in a hardscrabble West Virginia coal mining community. I’m the oldest girl, with three older brothers. Trust me—that’s not an enviable birth position. From the time I was a child, I was responsible for housework, changing diapers, and caring for my many younger siblings. My escape was reading, my favorite place the library.

In the late 1960s, my parents had a printing business in South San Francisco. We older kids all had jobs. Mine included sorting type—placing metal letters in their proper little section of a wooden tray. Forming words, letter by physical letter, ingrained in me the importance of detail. Vicky has the same compulsion, though she grew up without family.

My family was emotionally and financially devastated when the printing business failed. Later, we traveled the country in a converted school bus, looking for a better place to be. When it broke down in South Carolina, we lived in an old wooden shack built on stacks of bricks, its only heat a woodstove made of an old 55-gallon drum. That was a miserable winter.

A couple more moves, and we were back in California, fourteen of us living in a single-wide mobile home. It was an enormously stressful time. When I was fifteen, I ran away from home and dropped out of school. Being homeless, then working minimum wage jobs quickly grew old. By the time I was twenty I’d called nineteen places home. I was ready to make a better life. I got my GED and went to college, where I met and married my husband, father of our two amazing grown children.

Having lived most of my young life feeling like an outsider, observing others, perhaps it’s natural I was drawn to a career in journalism. Since I was desperately shy it may seem odd that I chose to work in television news, but I was fascinated by the fast pace, the excitement, the no-day-the-same reality of it all. Perhaps that was related to the chaos of my upbringing.

After thirty-plus years covering stories—big and small, devastating or joyous, complicated or simple—I know that everything comes down to understanding people. What drove me as a journalist is what drives Vicky—a deep longing to find truth, and to understand why people make the choices they do. There’s always more to the story, especially when it’s your own.