<p><br />
Thomas A. Burns, Jr. is the author of the Natalie McMasters Mysteries.<br />
He was born and grew up in New Jersey, attended Xavier High School in<br />
Manhattan, earned B.S degrees in Zoology and Microbiology at Michigan<br />
State University and a M.S. in Microbiology at North Carolina State<br />
University. He currently resides in Wendell, North Carolina. As a kid,<br />
Tom started reading mysteries with the Hardy Boys, Ken Holt and Rick<br />
Brant, and graduated to the classic stories by authors such as A. Conan<br />
Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex<br />
Stout, to name a few. Tom has written fiction as a hobby all of his<br />
life, starting with Man from U.N.C.L.E. stories in marble-backed<br />
copybooks in grade school. He built a career as technical, science and<br />
medical writer and editor for nearly thirty years in industry and<br />
government. Now that he's truly on his own as a novelist, he's excited<br />
to publish his own mystery series, as well as to contribute stories<br />
about his second most favorite detective, Sherlock Holmes, to the MX<br />
anthology of New Sherlock Holmes Stories.</p>
