March 2 – 8: “Do publishers fact-check – or is that the author’s job?”

Do publishers fact-check – or is that the author’s job? Join ITW Members Jean Heller, Francine Mathews, Rick Campbell, Mary Louise Kelly, Cecilia Ekback and Jeffrey B. Burton as they discuss the big mistakes they’ve spotted.

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Most of Jean Heller’s career was as an investigative and projects reporter and editor in New York City, Washington, D.C. and St. Petersburg Florida. Her career as a novelist began in the 1990s with the publication of the thrillers, “Maximum Impact” and “Handyman” by St. Martin’s Press. Then life intervened and postponed her new book, “The Someday File,” to publication in late 2014. Jean has won the Worth Bingham Prize, the Polk Award, and is an eight-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.

Mary Louise Kelly spent two decades traveling the world as a reporter for NPR and the BBC. Her assignments have taken her from grimy Belfast bars to the glittering ports of the Persian Gulf, and from Hamburg mosques to the deserts of Iraq. As NPR’s intelligence correspondent, she reported on wars, terrorism, and rising nuclear powers. Kelly was educated at Harvard and at Cambridge University in England. She lives in Washington, DC and Florence, Italy with her husband and their two children.

Cecilia Ekbäck was born in Sweden in a northern fishing town. Her parents come from Lapland. After university she specialised in marketing and worked for a multinational for twenty years with postings in Russia, Germany, France, Portugal and the Middle East. In 2010, she finished Royal Holloway’s Master in Creative Writing. She is now lives in Calgary, ‘returning home’ to the landscape and the characters of her childhood in her writing. WOLF WINTER is her first novel.

Jeffrey B. Burton’s mystery/thriller, The Lynchpin, comes out February 24, 2015. His mystery/thriller, The Chessman (a serial killer is in hot pursuit of his own copycat), came out in 2012. Jeff is an active member of International Thriller Writers (ITW), the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), the Horror Writers Association (HWA), and the International Association of Crime Writers – North American Branch. You can find him on his website, Facebook, and Amazon.

Francine Mathews is the author of 25 novels of mystery and suspense. A graduate of Princeton and Stanford, she spent four years as an intelligence analyst at the CIA, where she briefly worked on the Counterterrorism Center’s investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The New Yorker called her previous spy thriller JACK 1939 “the most deliciously high-concept thriller imaginable.” As Stephanie Barron, she writes the Jane Austen Mystery Series. She lives with her husband and two sons in Denver, Colorado.

Rick Campbell, a retired Navy Commander, spent more than twenty-five years in the Navy, serving on four nuclear-powered submarines, finishing his career with tours in the Pentagon and in the Washington Navy Yard. On his last submarine, he was one of the two men whose permission is required to launch the submarine’s nuclear warhead-tipped missiles. Rick lives with his wife and three children in the greater Washington, D.C. area, and is working on the third and fourth books in this series, sequels to The Trident Deception (2014) and Empire Rising (2015), due out in 2016 and 2017.