About Lillian O'Donnell

She was born in Trieste, Italy but spent most of her life in New York City. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, New York and her first career was in the theatre - as an actress on stage and television and as first female stage manager on Broadway. Until 1954, she worked as a director and stage manager of summer stock packages for The Shubert Organization. In 1954, she married J. Leonard O'Donnell.

From 1960, she published ten stand-alone novels. They varied from fairly stock murder mysteries to novels of psychological suspense. Only one, The Face of the Crime, was a police procedural.[5] In 1972, her first book with Nora Mulcahaney The Phone Calls was published. It brought back characters from her earlier police novel, but with the addition of the female lead. In total, 17 books were published in this series, the last in 1998. Each book focused on a single major crime and Nora's concerns about her personal life were intertwined with her working life.