BIOGRAPHY Ridley Pearson's novels cover a lot of ground: from paranormals to Peter Pan. With an emphasis on entertaining the reader and delivering screw-tightening suspense, both his crime fiction and young-reader novels have earned him a reputation for detailed research and hair-raising story lines. Ridley began his professional career as a singer/songwriter in an acoustic rock band and spent a decade on the road playing gigs between clubs and colleges. Today, he is a founding member of The Rockbottom Remainders, an all-author '60s rock and roll band now featuring Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Mitch Albom, Scott Turow, Greg Isles and Roy Blount, Jr. (with cameos by Stephen King) whose motto is: "We play music as well as Metallica writes novels." It was in the band that Ridley and Dave Barry became friends and went on to collaborate on a series of novels that explain the beginnings of Peter Pan. Peter and the Starcatchers spent 47 weeks on the New York Times Children's Bestseller List. Disney Animated Features has optioned the novel for both film and stage productions. The Kingdom Keepers, a Young Adult novel about five kids inside Disney World after dark drew the most fan mail of any novel he's written. The second book in the series is scheduled for summer, 2008. With 24 novels to his credit, New York Times best-selling author Pearson has earned a reputation for stories that grip the imagination, emphasize high-tech crime and dazzling forensic detail, and, all too often, imitate life. His classic 1988 novel, Undercurrents, helped a prosecuting attorney from Washington state solve a real-life homicide by referring to research methods used in the book. The attorney—who happened to be reading Undercurrents at the time—enlisted the aid of an oceanographer mentioned in the book's acknowledgment page. The oceanographer identified a tidal flow and "window of time" essential to the case and, serving as an expert witness, helped convict the victim's husband of murder. The topic of his 1995 novel, Chain of Evidence, which involved the possible existence of a crime gene, was the focus of a genetics conference later that year that erupted in controversy, making national news. Beyond Recognition (1997), tackled the violent mystery of high-tech arson, and modeled a series of mysterious arsons, the solution to which, the government later backed away from. Ridley has co-produced and written documentaries for television including one for A&E on Alcoholics Anonymous, and is currently working on a dramatic television series, The Culture, for Equinoxe Films. He wrote the script for the two hour ABC movie, based on his #1 New York Times bestseller, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer. He is currently writing a crime series for Putnam/Penguin for editor Christine Pepe. The first in the series, Killer Weekend, was released in 2007, and became an instant New York Times Bestseller. The second in the Sun Valley series, Killer View, will be published in summer 2008. Ridley's Lou Boldt novels are on hiatus but remain very much alive. In 1991, Pearson became the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler Fulbright at Oxford University, where he researched and outlined both The Angel Maker and No Witnesses. The fellowship recognizes published writers with "emerging reputations," and helped him hone his natural fascination with forensic detection and focus his active imagination. Raised in Riverside, Connecticut, Ridley, his wife, Marcelle, and their two daughters, Paige and Storey, now reside in St. Louis, MO.