Alafair Burke

She currently lives in New York City and is a Professor of Law at Hofstra University School of Law. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Mystery Writers of America and as President of its New York chapter. In 2017, she was elected as a member of the American Law Institute. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Authors Guild Foundation.

In 2017, Burke was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel for her book, The Ex.

In 2014, publisher Simon & Schuster announced that Mary Higgins Clark and Burke were collaborating on the Under Suspicion series, featuring an intrepid television journalist who reinvestigates cold cases.

Burke's Samantha Kincaid series is set in the Multnomah County District Attorney's Office, where Burke worked in the 1990s. In creating NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher, Burke drew on her experience growing up in Kansas. Like Burke, Hatcher was raised in Wichita. Hatcher's father was a Wichita police detective who spent his career hunting a serial killer who evaded police for thirty years.

Burke was born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and raised primarily in Wichita, Kansas, where her mother, Pearl Pai Chu, was a school librarian and her father, fellow crime novelist James Lee Burke, was a professor of English. She traces her fascination with crime to the hunt for the serial killer known as BTK, who was active in Wichita during the 1970s.

Alafair S. Burke (born October 1969) is an American crime novelist, professor of law, and legal commentator. She is the New York Times bestselling author of eighteen crime novels, including The Ex, The Wife, and The Better Sister, and two series—one featuring NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher; the other, Portland, Oregon, prosecutor Samantha Kincaid. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.