Martin J. Smith, 43, is a veteran journalist and magazine editor. He has won more than 40 newspaper and magazine writing awards, and four times was nominated by his newspaper for the Pulitzer Prize.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he began writing professionally while a student at Pennsylvania State University in the late 1970s. His 15-year career as a newspaper reporter took him around the world, from the rural poverty of Southwestern Pennsylvania to Nevada's Mustang Ranch bordello; from the riot-torn streets of Los Angeles to the revolutionary streets of Manila; from pre-glasnost Siberia to the new frontier of cyberspace. He currently is a senior editor at The Los Angeles Times Magazine.

His Anthony Award-nominated first novel, Time Release (Jove 1997), is now in its third printing. Best-selling author James Ellroy calls it "a whipcord thriller full of deftly drawn characters, intrigue and taut action...a spellbindingly accomplished first novel." Time Release features memory expert Jim Christensen and examines the volatile issue of repressed memories against the backdrop of a sensational product-tampering case. The story was conceived as the 10th anniversary of the infamous Tylenol killings neared and inspired by the controversy over repressed-memory prosecutions during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In Shadow Image (Jove 1998), a sequel inspired by the plight of former President Ronald Reagan, Christensen is drawn into the labyrinth of Alzheimer's disease and a complex web of lies created by one of Pennsylvania's wealthiest and most powerful political families. New York Times best-selling author Michael Connelly says "Shadow Image hooks you quickly and yanks you right through to the last page."

Straw Men, the third book in Smith's "Memory Series," will debut in January 2001. It begins when new DNA evidence frees an unpredictable and disfigured young man known as the Scarecrow eight years after he was convicted of a vicious sexual attack. The new evidence forces the woman whose testimony put him behind bars to confront memories that are violent, vivid-and apparently wrong. Only Christensen, her one-time nemesis, can pull the truth from her shattered mind before the man who left her for dead can finish the job.

Best-selling author Barbara Seranella calls Christensen "a wonderfully unique sleuth [who] tackles the most mysterious setting of all: the Bermuda Triangle of human memory," and Edgar Award winner Laura Lippman calls Straw Men "the creepiest good time I've had in ages."