"Readers will be lost in the vivid world that Shelley Bates paints with incredible detail and masterful storytelling."
  --W. Terry Whalin, FaithfulReader.com

Whether typing search warrants and making undercover phone calls as an admin for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, or editing marketing material for the high-tech industry in Silicon Valley, Shelley Bates has found that everyone has a story. Most people have stopped telling her theirs in case she puts them in her books.

Shelley has a B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an M.A. in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania. She sold her master's thesis to a major commercial publisher after she graduated in 2002, and it subsequently became a double finalist in the 2004 National Readers Choice Awards.

Grounds to Believe, her debut novel from Steeple Hill Books and the first book in her Elect Trilogy, won the 2005 RITA Award for Best Inspirational Novel of the Year from the Romance Writers of America. The second book in the trilogy, Pocketful of Pearls, became a RITA Award finalist the following year.

Between books, Shelley enjoys playing the piano and Celtic harp, making historical costumes, and spoiling her flock of rescue chickens rotten.

"Shelley Bates is a brave and talented author who looks at the darkness as well as the light."
  --Mary Jo Putney