Moderator:
Leslie Silbert

Barry Eisler

Raymond Benson

Joseph Finder

Gayle Lynds

BARRY EISLER is the bestselling author whose thrillers have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year, have been included in numerous "Best Of" lists, and have been translated into nearly twenty languages. The first book in Eisler's assassin John Rain series, Rain Fall, has been made into a movie starring Gary Oldman that was released by Sony Pictures in April 2009.

RAYMOND BENSON'S novel TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL (written under the pseudonym "David Michaels") made the New York Times Best Seller Paperbacks) List! It entered at #10 the week of December 2004. His Bond short stories have been published in Playboy and TV Guide magazines. He is also the author of the suspense novels, Face Blind and Evil Hours, and the non-fiction books The Pocket Essentials Guide to Jethro Tull and The James Bond Bedside Companion (the latter was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Biographical/Critical Work in 1984). Raymond also has extensive experience directing stage plays, composing music, and designing and writing adventure computer games.
(Author photo by Paul F. Dantuono.)

JOSEPH FINDER is the internationally bestselling author of eight novels
whom the Boston Globe has called a "master of the modern thriller." His most recent book, Power Play, debuted in the top ten on the New York
Times bestseller list in September 2007. His previous book, Killer
Instinct, was also a New York Times bestseller and was named the Best
Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers association. His other bestsellers include Paranoia and Company Man. One of his earlier novels, High Crimes, became a hit movie starring Morgan Freeman and
Ashley Judd --and Joe himself played a cameo role in the film.

Joe’s latest novel VANISHED, published August 2009 by St. Martin's Press, launched a four-book series featuring corporate security specialist Nick Heller.

Trained in the Special Forces, Nick is a high-powered intelligence investigator – exposing secrets that powerful people would rather keep hidden.

GAYLE LYNDS is the award-winning author of eight international Espionage novels, including The Last Spymaster, The Coil, Masquerade, and Mesmerized, which are published in some 20 countries. Her books have won numerous awards, including “Novel of the Year” (The Last Spymaster) given by the Military Writers Society of America, People magazine "Page-Turner of the Week" and "Beach Read of the Week." Publishers Weekly lists her work among the top ten spy Novels of all time, and called The Last Spymaster a "classic espionage thriller… (that) strikes a perfect balance between the private lives of her Characters and the blood and betrayal of their professional adventures.” BookPage concurs: “Gayle Lynds has joined the deified ranks of spy thriller authors like Robert Ludlum and John le Carre.” With Ludlum, she created the Covert-One series. “The Hades Factor” was a CBS miniseries in April 2006. Gayle’s late husband, the noted detective novelist Dennis Lynds, was an Santa Barbara Writers Conference teacher. Read more about Gayle at www.gaylelinds.com.