Colleen Collins was born on 26 November 1951. She graduated at the University of California Santa Barbara. At three years old, she did Jack Benny impressions (or so her father claims). It must have been prophetic because she eventually performed stand-up and improvisational comedy in Los Angeles and Denver. She worked as a film production assistant, improv comic, telecommunications manager at the RAND Corporation, technical writer/editor, speech writer, and private investigator. All these experiences play into her writing.
Along the way, she cowrote a joke book, How to Exercise with Your Computer, which landed her on the cover of National Lampoon magazine. The writing bug had bitten. She joined the Romance Writers of America, the Colorado Romance Writers, and began learning the craft of romance-fiction writing. She entered a Harlequin Temptation contest and placed second. Several years later, she was thrilled to sell her first novel to Harlequin Love & Laughter. The book, titled Right Chest, Wrong Name, was nominated by Romantic Times Magazine for best Love & Laughter romance and was also a finalist in the prestigious Award of Excellence contest. Since then she has written several more books for Harlequin. She also published an indie-published mystery, The Zen Man (as Cassandra Collins) and two nonfiction books, How Do Private Eyes Do That? and How to Write a Dick: A Guide for Writing Fictional Sleuths from a Couple of Real-Life Sleuths (the latter co-authored with Shaun Kaufman).
Her books have placed first in the Colorado Gold, Romancing the Rockies, and Top of the Peak contests, and placed in the finals for the Holt Medallion, Best Indie Books 2012, Coeur de Bois Readers Choice, Award of Excellence, More than Magic, and Romance Writers of America RITA contests. She’s a member of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), Private Eye Writers of America (PWA), the Sisters in Crime. When not sleuthing or writing, she likes to spend time with her husband and their two Rottweilers and three cats.
