Diane Partie Tyrrel

Diane Partie Tyrrel was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. At an early age she moved with her family to Santa Barbara, California, where she grew up "scribbling". She started writing seriously when she was a stay-at-home mom with young children. At the same time, she was finishing college with a degree in interior design and a specialty certification in residential interior design. Diane and her husband David Tyrrel own a remodel construction business and have bought and fixed up several old houses. It was one of these restoration experiences that inspired her first novel, On the Edge of the Woods.

Besides real estate, hobbies include landscape painting, belly dancing, gardening and, of course, reading. She lives in Northern California.

Note from the author

One summer when I was a kid, my family was traveling across country by car, and my mother and I took turns reading aloud from a book that really captured my imagination. I don't know what the book was called or who wrote it, but it was the quintessential gothic romance, a passionate love story with shivery suspense---probably a bit trashy---and I loved it. When I was in sixth grade, I read Victoria Holt's Mistress of Mellyn, and once again, I loved that combination of suspense and romance.

My gothic romance is contemporary; and in modern-day California we don't have too many stone castles or wild, windswept moors. We do have gorgeous, moody landscapes constantly changing with the weather and the seasons, and beautiful people who fall in love and fight and fall prey to misunderstandings of the heart, like people all over the world.