The author, Gerald (Ger) Medenwald, has a BA in English and an MA in educational psychology. He's been a band director, high school counselor, musician, unit administrator at a developmental center, psychologist, truck driver, barn painter, and bartender. Now, he and his wife, Susan Mack, own and operate a stained glass studio and a small, online, used, book store. Ger grew up in Lidgerwood, ND, a place where, in June, he and the other children were tagged and released, free to terrorize the country side and to stay with friends and relatives until late August. Then they were rounded up, identified, scrubbed, and forced back to school. Nasty North Dakota winters forced him and the other little urchins into the protective custody of well meaning teachers, frustrated coaches, and hopeful clergy; but a hidden book always provided respite. He blames his mother's job as assistant librarian for his life long addiction to books. With a monkey on his back, and fearing the absence of his next reading "fix," he's accumulated a library of 3000+ books and has become a "pusher"– selling the next escape from reality to all comers. Once a tie and jacket proud professional, he is now often seen in jeans with dirty worn out knees, crawling through thrift store racks looking for his next "fix." Ger began writing short stories in his senior year in college. After an extended hiatus ("life happened," he says) he's back at it. Beauty Tips for the Dead is either his third or fifth novel, depending upon how you count a trilogy that gasped tragically, then collapsed and disintegrated in the middle of book three. Beauty Tips is the first to be published. He's working on his next novel.