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Betsy Thornton is a contemporary American writer of mystery fiction novels set in the Southwestern United States.
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Betsy Thornton is a contemporary American writer of mystery fiction novels set in the Southwestern United States.
Thornton was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States, the oldest of four children born to Dr. Mary Elizabeth (Kelly) Thornton, PhD a professor of Classics at Miami University of Ohio and Colonel Robert L. Thornton, PhD, who became professor of Business at Miami of Ohio following his retirement from the USAF. Her sister Alix was an attorney and her brother is historian John Thornton. Her family traveled extensively, living in Europe for several years, where Thornton attended Lady Eden's School in London and Cours Ste. Geneviève in Fonteney sur Bois, a suburb of Paris. She graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University with a degree in English, married, and lived in New York City, where her son Alex Chapin, now an academic technologist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was born. She later moved to 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.
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.
Cochise County is a county in the southeastern corner of the U.S. state of Arizona. It is named after the Native American chief Cochise.
Bisbee is a city in and the county seat of Cochise County in southeastern Arizona, United States. It is 92 miles (148 km) southeast of Tucson and 11 miles (18 km) north of the Mexican border. According to the 2020 census, the population of the town was 4,923, down from 5,575 in the 2010 census.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020 she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Barbara Hambly is an American novelist and screenwriter within the genres of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and historical fiction. She is the author of the bestselling Benjamin January mystery series featuring a free man of color, a musician and physician, in New Orleans in the antebellum years. She also wrote a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln.
Mary Katherine Horony Cummings, popularly known as Big Nose Kate, was a Hungarian-born American outlaw, gambler, prostitute and longtime companion and common-law wife of Old West gambler and gunfighter Doc Holliday. "Tough, stubborn and fearless", she was educated, but chose to work as a prostitute due to the independence it provided her. She is the only woman with whom Holliday is known to have had a relationship.
Pete Spence was a small-time criminal known for his association with outlaw Cowboys Frank and Tom McLaury, and Ike and Billy Clanton, of Tombstone, Arizona Territory. Spence was also a suspect in the assassination of Morgan Earp. His wife Marietta Duarte testified that Spence and several friends had talked about killing Morgan, but the judge ruled her testimony inadmissible. Spence was first suspected of robbery in 1878 in Goliad County, Texas. He was suspected of stealing mules and later a suspect in a stagecoach robbery outside Bisbee, Arizona. While a deputy sheriff, he pistol-whipped and killed a man for which he served 18 months of a five-year term before the governor pardoned him.
Charlotte Wilder was an American poet and academic who worked in the Federal Writers Project.
Alafair S. Burke is an American crime novelist, professor of law, and legal commentator. She is a New York Times bestselling author of 18 crime novels, including The Ex, The Wife, and The Better Sister, and two series—one featuring NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher, and the other, Portland, Oregon, prosecutor Samantha Kincaid. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
The Bisbee Deportation was the illegal kidnapping and deportation of about 1,300 striking mine workers, their supporters, and citizen bystanders by 2,000 members of a deputized posse, who arrested them beginning on July 12, 1917, in Bisbee, Arizona. The action was orchestrated by Phelps Dodge, the major mining company in the area, which provided lists of workers and others who were to be arrested to the Cochise County sheriff, Harry C. Wheeler. Those arrested were taken to a local baseball park before being loaded onto cattle cars and deported 200 miles (320 km) to Tres Hermanas in New Mexico. The 16-hour journey was through desert without food and with little water. Once unloaded, the deportees, most without money or transportation, were warned against returning to Bisbee. The US government soon brought in members of the US Army to assist with relocating the deportees to Columbus, New Mexico.
Paige Rense, also known as Paige Rense Noland was an American writer and editor who served as editor-in-chief of Architectural Digest magazine from 1975 until 2010. She founded the Arthur Rense Prize poetry award. Rense also transformed the cooking magazine Bon Appétit into its modern format, was editor-in-chief of GEO, and wrote a mystery novel, Manor House.
Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park is a state park of Arizona in the United States. Located in Tombstone, the park preserves the original Cochise County courthouse. The two-story building, constructed in 1882 in the Victorian style, is laid out in the shape of a cross and once contained various county offices, including those of the sheriff, recorder, treasurer, and the Board of Supervisors as well as courtrooms and a jail. Inside, the courthouse contains a museum with numerous artifacts from the town's history while outside, a replica gallows has been constructed in the courtyard to mark the spot where seven men were hanged for various crimes. The park was one of the first to be designated as a state park and in 1959 was the first to open following the 1957 establishment of the Arizona State Parks Board.
Sarah Herring Sorin was Arizona's first woman attorney and the first woman to try a case in front of the United States Supreme Court unassisted by a male attorney. Sorin practiced law with her father William Herring in the firm "Herring & Sorin" initially in Tombstone, Arizona, and later in Tucson. After her father's death, Sorin moved to Globe, Arizona, where she became the attorney for the Old Dominion Copper Company and United Globe Mines. Sarah Sorin is a member of the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame.(See photo of Sarah Herring Sorin in the Arizona Library Archives.) She is also included in Stanford Law School's Women's Legal History Biography Project.
Elizabeth Anne Gunn was an American writer.
Camillus "Buck" Sydney Fly was an Old West photographer who is regarded by some as an early photojournalist and who captured the only known images of Native Americans while still at war with the United States. He took many other pictures of life in the silver-mining boom town of Tombstone, Arizona and the surrounding region. He recognized the value of his photographs to illustrate periodicals of the day and took his camera to the scenes of important events where he recorded them and resold pictures to editors nationwide.
William Bayer is an American novelist, the author of twenty-one books including The New York Times best-sellers Switch and Pattern Crimes.
The Bisbee massacre occurred in Bisbee, Arizona, on December 8, 1883, when six outlaws who were part of the Cochise County Cowboys robbed a general store. Believing the general store's safe contained a mining payroll of $7,000, they timed the robbery incorrectly and were only able to steal between $800 and $3,000, along with a gold watch and jewelry. During the robbery, members of the gang killed five people, including a lawman and a pregnant woman. Six men were convicted of the robbery and murders. John Heath, who was accused of organizing the robbery, was tried separately and sentenced to life in prison. The other five men were convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.
The Bisbee Riot, or the Battle of Brewery Gulch, occurred on July 3, 1919, between the black Buffalo Soldiers of the 10th Cavalry and members of local police forces in Bisbee, Arizona.
Franklin Einspruch is an American artist and writer based in Hillsborough, New Hampshire.
Mary Edith "Mollie" Fly (1847–1925) was a late 19th and early 20th century American photographer who co-founded and managed Fly's Photography Gallery in Tombstone, Arizona, with her husband, photographer C. S. Fly. She ran the studio solo for a decade after his death. There were very few women photographers in this period, and her contributions were recognized in 1989 when she was inducted into the Arizona Women's Hall of Fame.
Fred Arthur Sutter Sr. was an Arizona attorney and politician. He ran several times, unsuccessfully, for governor of the state, and was elected several times to the state legislature.