Julie Compton was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the setting for her first novel, TELL NO LIES. She spent the first 33 years of her life there but has since lived in the suburbs of Boston, Philadelphia, and now Orlando, Florida. She is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, with degrees in law and English literature. After practicing with private firms early in her legal career, she most recently worked as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in Wilmington, Delaware, where she worked on some of the largest corporate bankruptcies in the nation.