Perri O'Shaughnessy

Puzzled to see one name but two people? Pamela (right) and Mary (left) O'Shaughnessy are sisters who write together. The name Perri is an amalgam of their names, Pamela and Mary, and an homage to Perry Mason, the popular fictional attorney created by Erle Stanley Gardner.

Mary was born in Northern California, Pamela in Missouri. They grew up and developed a taste for imaginary crime in the suburbs of Los Angeles, including Whittier, Yorba Linda, Placentia, and Redondo Beach. (Coolest of all had to be Redondo, with its glorious sunshine and ocean, the ideal archetypal environment for budding writers.) Pamela attended Whittier College, UCLA and Long Beach State University, eventually graduating with a degree in political science, which she followed up with a law degree from Harvard Law School in Cambridge. Mary also attended Long Beach, finishing her B. A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara magna cum laude with a degree in English literature. After college, she moved to Boston, her home base while she worked on multi-media projects in New York, Washington D. C., and the Virgin Islands.

Mary lives in northern California, Pam in Hawaii. Pamela has a son, and Mary is married with three children. Together, Mary and Pam write novels featuring attorney Nina Reilly, a South Lake Tahoe solo practitioner and short stories featuring whatever mysterious events they happen to be pondering.