BURLINGTON — Unless one lives under a rock, it’s almost impossible for a writer to be unaware of British mystery master Agatha Christie, creator of iconic detectives like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Like most, Lee Clark knew of Christie but had never read one of her books. That was until she became a mystery writer herself, earning rave reviews from fans who noted her style drew comparisons to greats like Christie, who paved the way for the genre.
Clark was born in Radford, Virginia. Her father, an Air Force man, moved the family to Raleigh when she was 4. She attended Campbell, and earned a journalism degree from East Carolina and a master’s in technical communication from NC State. After grad school, Clark worked at IBM for 23 years and had two children. Despite being successfully employed and content, she felt a higher calling to her true passion.
“I was a square peg in a round hole,” she said.
In 2014, ideas began to percolate as her dull work landscape, void of real relationships, spurred her to put pen to paper.
“By 2017, I was done with corporate America,” she said.
Around the time the COVID-19 pandemic shut the world down, Clark decided to bring her ideas to life and answer that higher calling. Inspired by two men — her brother Sean and son Will — and driven by a restless mind, Clark created the young, curious physician Matthew Paine and the tenacious detective Warren Danbury, whose lives would collide in a series of thrillers.
“If there’s ever a time to take a chance, it’s during a pandemic,” Clark said. “So I finished it, and then the question became, would anybody ever want to read it?”
She decided to self-publish and launched Cypress River Media, inspired by treasured memories of time spent at her grandfather’s cottage on the Chickahominy River in Lenox of Virginia, where a giant Cyprus once towered.
“It’s a place that my heart still longs to go back to,” she said.
Seven novels later, Clark’s gripping storylines that seem all too close to reality have transported voracious readers into worlds of murder, intrigue and suspense while touching on the emotional battles of Paine and other key characters as if it were a microscope dissecting the fibers of the human psyche.
Clark’s ideas for her books come from an eerie confluence of research, life experiences and an uncanny ability to turn mundane observations into malevolent settings.
“I do a lot of research for these books because even though the storylines and characters are obviously fictional, the scenarios that I set up absolutely could happen,” she said. “But my mind is a scary place.”
“Killer Convergence,” the culmination of the Matthew Paine series, delivers readers the twists and turns of each installment as the young physician assists his close friend, detective Warren Danbury, in tenaciously reexamining the murder of his parents 22 years before. Evidence goes missing, no one’s memories can be trusted, and witnesses start turning up dead.
