Steve Kohlhagen is a former economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a former Wall Street investment banker, and is on several corporate boards, most recently elected to the board of Freddie Mac. While at Berkeley he authored many economics publications, and he and his wife Gale jointly published the murder mystery Tiger Found in 2008.
Kohlhagen was inspired to write his first novel, Where They Bury You, after reading Hampton Sides‘ Blood and Thunder, a non-fiction history of Kit Carson and the West. Sides’ reporting of the factual murder of Marshal Joseph Cummings on August 18, 1863 led Kohlhagen to conduct further research on Carson and Cummings. His discovery of a historical gang of con artists led to the creation of the fictional characters who, along with the surviving historical characters, drive the action in the sequel, Chief of Thieves. In truth, the unfinished journey of the protagonists and the coincidence that involved George Armstrong Custer throughout the story leading up to the climactic Battle of the Little Bighorn inspired the sequel.
Kohlhagen also pulled from his own knowledge of the West, as he divides his time between the New Mexico-Colorado border high in the San Juan Mountains and Charleston, South Carolina.
Steven W. Kohlhagen
swk@stevenwkohlhagen.com
SWK ARTISTS LLC