I was born and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, attending LSU like my father before me.  In 1968, I entered the Duke University graduate English program.  This is where I met my wife Susan.  Five years later we moved to coastal Virginia, where we both taught freshman English and American literature at (the recently renamed) Virginia Peninsula Community College. I also taught fiction into film, a valuable undertaking for a would-be writer. When we retired, I started writing seriously, and so far have had three mystery novels published by High Tide Publishers: Night Journey,  Voice from the Shadows, and Falcon.  They follow the career of detective Cynthia Westbrook, a plainclothes sheriff's investigator in Northern Virginia.  The most interesting thing about a mystery, in my view, is the detective, and so Cynthia's cases are intertwined in various ways with her non-professional life. In Voices, for example, she returns to Alabama to investigate the cold-case murder of her mother. After writing these novels, I had a desire to stretch creatively, and the result was a forthcoming collection of short novels and stories, tentatively titled Last Things, that deals with the ultimate, unsolvable mysteries of existence.  But I wasn't finished with Cynthia, and am presently working on a fourth mystery about her.  Several years after our retirement, Susan and I moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, in the mountainous part of the state, and I started taking early morning walks up to a meadow where the sun rises over the mountains.  This view and the surrounding landscapes were so lovely that I soon began photographing them and posting a few pictures each morning on Facebook as a visual diary.  If anyone is interested, these posts are no longer restricted to FB friends. To see them, simply search for H. Scott Butler on Facebook.