I was the Project Manager of NASA’s highly successful Mars Global Surveyor Mission – a spacecraft that orbited Mars for nine years, returning two hundred thousand images of the planet and relaying pictures from the Mars Rovers. I have published seven historical mystery thrillers of the Darmon Mystery series about a couple from Kent that solves international crimes during the 1830’s. I grew up in North Hollywood reading science fiction. As an amateur astronomer, I built telescopes and spent many a cold night in Fraser Park taking pictures of nebulae, galaxies and comets. During summers while attending UCLA, I worked at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center with the original seven astronauts, Lowell Observatory and JPL. Upon graduation, I started employment at Eastman Kodak (Lunar Orbiter) before returning to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. There, I spent 38 years participating in the defining moments of Mars exploration by Mariner, Viking and Surveyor spacecraft. Ultimately, I managed the Mars Global Surveyor Mission through most of its ten-year operational life. I have published numerous science articles on Mars photometry and also taught astronomy in Glendale College’s extended day program for nearly forty years. With a career in space exploration, you might wonder why I chose to write books of historical fiction rather than science fiction. It could be that many years in one field leads a person to other avenues of interest. A catalyst for my stories can be found in the novels by Jane Austen. Her vivid portrayals make it easy to imagine similar characters involved in more adventuresome activities such as murder mysteries of the period. The research required to create accurate settings is not unlike the practice in science, and typically, a year’s research was necessary to put the mystery/thrillers into authentic historical periods for each country. And then, there are similarities in the difficulties facing characters surviving in a foreign country during the early 1800’s, not unlike landing on an alien planet.