To graduate, though, we had to take at least one fiction course, so I signed up for short story writing. Meanwhile, I’d been working on a master’s degree in creative nonfiction at the University of Minnesota. Then I talked myself into a theater critic job at Minnesota Public Radio, which led to writing theater reviews for the Pioneer Press, Star Tribune, Minnesota Monthly, and other outlets. It was hard to break into theater in the early ’80s, so for years my day job was in administration for the Minnesota State Arts Board. How did you move from theater major to mystery writer? The first draft is complete, she says, meaning the book, tentatively titled The Spirit Pool, is likely to be published in 2019. She is now hard at work on her fifth mystery, this one set during the early 1930s in the desolate Burren region of western Ireland, a limestone landscape full of caves and underground rivers.

Paul, Minnesota, with her Irish musician husband, Paddy O’Brien, returns to Ireland several times a year for family visits and book research, and regularly guides tours of the country she has come to know and love. It was followed by Lake of Sorrows, False Mermaid, and The Book of Killowen. The first mystery, Haunted Ground, was an Agatha Award finalist and an ALA Booklist Top Ten Crime Novel of 2003. Today, nearly 40 years later, Hart is the author of four briskly selling mysteries set in that island nation, featuring Irish-American archaeologist Nora Gavin and pathologist Cormac Maguire. Olaf after being stymied in her attempts to work in any capacity on plays at the University of Minnesota, wedged in a weekend trip to Ireland.Īnd so, one of the most important relationships of her life was born. When a short break presented itself, the theater major, who had transferred to St. Olaf College’s famously intense (26 plays in 28 days) Theater in London Interim.

Erin Hart’s lifelong love affair with Ireland - which took hold in childhood - truly ignited when she traveled to London for St.

Lake of Sorrows by Erin Hart