Betsy Thornton

Betsy Thornton
Betsy Thornton
Born	Wilmington, North Carolina, U.S.
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Ohio Wesleyan University
Genre	Mystery fiction
Parents	Robert L. Thornton; Mary Elizabeth Kelly
Relatives	John Thornton (brother)
Website
	betsythornton.com

Betsy Thornton is a contemporary American writer of mystery fiction novels set in the Southwestern United States.

Biography

Thornton was born in

Venice, California, where she worked as a story analyst for ABC Pictures, and then moved to Europe with her second husband, the artist Rafe Ropek. They lived in Rome and on a small Greek island, Skopelos

.

Eventually, after a stint back in New York City, Thornton moved to Bisbee, Arizona, where she ran Cochise Fine Arts, a community arts center that sponsored, among other things, the Bisbee Poetry Festival.

Thornton was employed for fifteen years with the Cochise County Attorney's office in Cochise County, Arizona, where she worked as an advocate for crime victims.

Thornton's first published work was a chapbook of poems, published by Binturong, On Davis Road. In 1982, she was awarded a Poetry Fellowship by the Arizona Commission on the Arts.

Mystery fiction

Thornton has authored eight mystery novels, all but one of which feature her main character, Chloe Newcomb. Newcomb works as a victim advocate, the same position that Thornton herself held.

In 2008, Thornton's sixth novel, A Song for You, was nominated for the

Mary Higgins Clark Award. Her works have been favorably reviewed in Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.^[1]^[2]^[3] They are published in hard covers by St. Martin's Press as well as in paperback. A Whole New Life was published in Reader's Digest Condensed Books

.

Thornton's latest work Empty Houses was issued by Severn House in the UK on March 31, 2015, and in the United States in July.