Phyllis Wachob grew up in the Central Valley of California, loving to read and use her imagination. After college at UC Santa Cruz, she began a career of travel and adventure, studying for an MA in England, traveling by bicycle through France and Italy, and then busing through Greece and Turkey. While trying to settle to life in California, working at a desk in an office, she stretched even further during vacations to Asia and beyond. She then became a full-time traveler and writer, spending a year in India, followed by a year traveling in Africa. She has continued to travel throughout her life and has to date, traveled to 75 countries.
English teaching as a profession was embraced during a spell in China, where she fell in love with the wild scenery and peoples of Chinese Turkestan. She subsequently lived in Japan, Taiwan, Australia (where she earned a Doctorate of Education in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages), China, Singapore, Egypt and Turkey, teaching and traveling. These extensive experiences are reflected in her mystery novels in the Teachers Abroad Mystery series. She took her knowledge of the people, places, food and customs and wove fictional stories of mystery and murder.
She has been influenced by the great mystery writers, (although she started with the Nancy Drew mysteries), enjoying Sherlock Homes and Agatha Christie’s books among others. She believes that characters and their vicissitudes form the crux of mysteries and the motivation to solve the whodunit is the driver of the story. The colorful, exotic, and unfamiliar should draw the reader into the core of the mystery, while the mundane and conventional hold the keys to the solution.
Currently she resides in Bakersfield, California where she was born. Her newest series, the Kern Kapers Mysteries, is set in Bakersfield and environs and features the characters who live there. She is a member of Writers of Kern and benefits from the connections of this professional writing community.