Janis Flores was born in Montana, grew up in Colorado, and vigorously resisted becoming a “Valley Girl” when her family was transferred to Southern California’s San Fernando Valley when she was a teenager. She became a Medical Technologist after college graduation, but working in the lab left little time for writing anything but test results. She married Ray Flores one day after her twenty-second birthday—not good planning there, but she figured he’d either remember the dates or forget them both. To his credit he’s never forgotten either—although she would just as soon forget the birthday date. 

After moving to Northern California—she to supervise a medical laboratory, he to develop his horseshoeing business, she kept complaining that she never had time to write. He told her to stop whining and take a class at the J.C. The class was on the short story, but as Janis obviously has a lot to say, she wrote her first novel during the class—a Gothic suspense called HAWKSHEAD that was subsequently published in hardcover by (then) Doubleday and Company. 

That first book was quickly followed by two more Gothics: PEREGRINE HOUSE and GYRFALCON HALL.