A few years ago Judith Yates Borger was a fulltime newspaper reporter who mothered three kids, two cats and a dog, ran a big house and tried to be a good wife. Her guilty pleasure was reading mysteries well past midnight. When the St. Paul Pioneer Press refused to pay for her car, which was firebombed while she covered a riot for the paper, she decided it was time to get a new gig. She began writing mysteries for other manic moms looking for the same guilty pleasures she had enjoyed. Her protagonist, Skeeter Hughes, is a newspaper reporter whose car gets firebombed in the first book. Skeeter faces the same conflict many women feel: How to juggle the personal with the professional. Borger lives in Minneapolis with her husband, John, and her Havanese puppy, Honey.