I was born in South Jersey, the land of Silk City diners, nuclear plants, cornfields and the Jersey Devil. My youth was spent reading voraciously, everything from Trixie Belden’s (in the vain hope that Jim would slip Trixie the tongue) to my Aunt Mary Ellen’s steamy bodice-ripping novels to anything in the stack of books my dad brought home from the library every Saturday, which got me hooked on the novels of Robert Ludlum and Donald E. Westlake.

After earning a degree in Marketing at Auburn University, I spent the next five years in the business world, which is a polite way of saying that I had eleven jobs in a five-year period, including door to door sales, skip tracing people who didn’t want to be found, repossessing cars and collecting on defaulted student loans. During this five-year period, I did an in-depth study of abnormal psychology and sociopathic behavior – and then I divorced him.

I didn’t have enough money for therapy, so I decided to go to medical school where I earned a degree as a doctor of podiatric medicine. That kept me occupied for the first two years and then I had what I refer to as a ‘walking nervous breakdown’. The school psychologist, Terry Murphy (thank you!) helped put me back together and I finished the last two years with weekly therapy and a healthy dose of legal pharmaceuticals.

My two-year surgical residency in Buffalo, New York introduced me to a new world of human behavior, including junkies, addicts, criminals, punks, S&M beauty queens and angry housewives with ice picks.

Upon graduation, I moved to Scottsdale, Arizona where I moved into my parent’s guest room (my standard of living skyrocketed!) and I took a loan to open a private practice so I could (finally!) be my own boss. With the money from my loan to start the practice, I hired and an old-fashioned matchmaker to find me a decent man with a career. She did find me a lovely man who I dated for a year and a half – and then I met my husband, whom I adore.

I love being a podiatrist and I am not ready to quit my day gig to become a full-time writer – mostly because I think I would go bat-shit crazy without the grounding (and humbling) force of dealing with the complex, subtle and fascinating world of feet. No, I do not have a foot fetish, but one does become fond of feet when they start paying for your mortgage and vacations.

My screenplay OH BROTHER won the Phoenix Film Festival screenwriting competition in 2005 and was optioned by Gold Circle Films in 2008. I’m the author of THE FALLEN ANGELS TRILOGY, which is a fast, fun detective series served up with wit, grit, and more than a few shocking twists. The Trilogy features a private detective father and his daughter who is riddled with anger management issues and has a penchant for finding trouble. This is one father-daughter relationship that careens from bad to worse and some unexpected places in between. I am the host of The Hidden Gems Podcast, which features classic short stories and the best original short stories you’ve never heard.

I hope you enjoy my stories! They were born from my passion for storytelling and my demented sense of what constitutes a grand ole time.

Gunning For Angels (Book 1 of the Fallen Angels Trilogy)

When a golden-haired beauty is found brutally slain, the last thing that sixteen-year-old Enid Iglowski expected was to become the prime suspect. Running away from her troubled home in Florida and newly arrived in Phoenix in search of her real father, a private detective named Jack Fox, Enid finds herself caught in a web of murder, violence, and underage sex trafficking.

Jack Fox, not handsome enough for Hollywood but too damned handsome for his own good, lands a plum job when the mysterious, gorgeous and stratospherically wealthy Eve Hargrove shows up at his office and drops a stack of cash in his lap. All he has to do is drop her troubled sister’s case—a down on her luck stripper with legs from here to the next zip code. It would all be so easy—if he didn’t have an inconvenient hard-on for the truth—and Eve.

When a corpse is found in the desert, a cold case gets red hot for Detective Bud Orlean, who will sacrifice everything, including his marriage, to prove that Eve Hargrove is a sociopathic killer. When the bodies start piling up and Enid Iglowski is at the center of every mess, Bud finds himself forced to work with the one man he despises, Jack Fox, to get to the truth.

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Black Market Angels (Book 2 of the Fallen Angels Series)

Private Investigator Jack Fox will sweet-talk the Devil on a Sunday and kiss the Pope on a Monday—whatever it takes to get to the truth. Between his newest case involving the brutal murder of a Russian mail-order bride, his 17-year-old daughter who is the poster child for anger non-management issues, and his ex-girlfriend-from-hell who is giving him an ultimatum that threatens to end in murder, Jack is pushed past his limits as he tries to keep his sanity—and catch a killer!

A fast, fun detective story served up with wit, grit, and shocking twists. C. Mack Lewis offers up a murder mystery with a father-daughter relationship that careens from bad to worse and some unexpected places in between. High-stakes thrills and drama!

Find Black Market Angels at www.amazon.com

 

The Angel Wore Black (Book 3 of The Fallen Angels Series)

Private Investigator Jack Fox is not sure how he went from being a freewheeling bachelor to the father of two daughters: a baby girl who is the product of his less-than-stellar life choice of hooking up with a convicted serial killer and 19-year-old Enid Iglowski who is going to her court-ordered anger management counseling sessions with the intelligent and sexy Dr. Melody Stuckley who, unbeknownst to Enid, Jack can’t seem to get out of his mind—or his bed. The past comes back to haunt Jack when his dreaded ex-wife, Stella, who is the Mistress of Phoenix’s hottest S&M dungeon, hires him to find her favorite missing cowboy. He knows the last thing he should do is take her case but, as always, his curiosity sends him chasing after the truth, which sets him and Enid on a collision course with a dangerous killer who is a fugitive from the law—and who just also happens be his current wife!

Find The Angel Wore Black at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B096SP6R6W