Jonathon King

Edgar-award winning author Jonathon King is the creator of the Max Freeman crime series set in the Everglades and on the hard streets of urban South Florida. In his previous career as a journalist, he was a police and court reporter for 24 years with the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale and the Philadelphia Daily News. "I have basically cannibalized my past news writing career to create the crime novels I now write. I've been on dozens of crime scenes, sat for hours in courtrooms, spent three days in a Florida prison (as a guest) and interviewed too many cops and victims and criminals and traumatized family members." "I've watched autopsies performed, sat in the back seat of a patrol car during a high-speed chase, had a gun pressed to the back of my head (mistaken for a dealer by an undercover cop) and sat in a bar with a detective watching a midget cocaine dealer lick the barbeque sauce off his stubby fingers while negotiating the sale of six kilos." In 2000 King spent two wintry months alone in a mountain cabin in North Carolina hiding out and writing the manuscript for The Blue Edge of Midnight which won the 2002 Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American author. After writing three more novels in the series, King quit journalism and now writes full time South Florida. His most recent work, Midnight Guardians, continues the Freeman series and is set in King's beloved Everglades where he canoes and airboats and tromps about regularly.