Author. She was best known for her popular alphabetically titled mystery series featuring the resilient, independent private detective Kinsey Millhone. She enrolled at the University of Louisville in 1957 as a English major. She later attended Western Kentucky State Teachers College (later Western Kentucky University) for two years before returning to the University of Louisville to complete her work toward a bachelors degree in 1961. She then enrolled in a graduate program at the University of Cincinnati, but found its emphasis on literary analysis not to her liking and soon left. She went to California in 1962 and lived in a variety of cities, before settling down in Santa Barbara in 1964. She would work as both a hospital admissions clerk and a medical secretary during this period of time. She also started writing on the side and completed two novels "Keziah Dane" in 1967 and "The Lolly-Madonna War" in 1969. The latter was later adapted to the movie screen in 1973. She later went into writing screenplays and collaborated with her third husband, Steve Humphrey, on several of them. After growing tired of the Hollywood system, she pursued mystery writing and in 1982, wrote "A is for Alibi", the first of what would become a series of mystery novels featuring the female detective Kinsey Millhone. Her second novel "B is for Burglar" came out in 1985 and after that, her novels would come each year until 1996's "M is for Malice". Her later novels would come more intermittent after that and would continue until "Y is for Yesterday" which was published in 2017, just months before she passed away. Her book "Kinsey and Me" (2013) was a combination of her autobiographical tales and short stories that featured Millhone. She was awarded the Grand Master Award in 2009 by the Mystery Writers of America.