DONIS CASEY was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A third generation Oklahoman, she and her siblings grew up among their aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents and great-grandparents on farms and in small towns, where they learned the love of family and independent spirit that characterizes the population of that pioneering state. Donis graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in English, and earned a Master’s degree in Library Science from Oklahoma University. After teaching school for a short time, she enjoyed a career as an academic librarian, working for many years at the University of Oklahoma and at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

Donis left academia in 1988 to start a Scottish import gift shop in downtown Tempe. After more than a decade as an entrepreneur, she decided to devote herself full-time to writing. The Old Buzzard Had It Coming is her first book. For the past twenty years, Donis has lived in Tempe, AZ, with her husband.

Alafair Tucker is a woman in her forties who lives with her husband and ten lively children on a farm outside of Boynton Oklahoma in the mid-1910s. I try for as authentic a depiction of this woman’s life in that place and time as humanly possible. I want the reader to feel like Alafair is a real person who has a life that matters, to care about her. I want to create a world and make the reader believe in it.

Most of my research for the first three books in the “Alafair Tucker Mysteries” was of the “if you haven’t gone there and done that, ask someone who has’ variety. Every book I write is different, and takes a different amount as well as different type of research, and I have had some adventures in research.

Besides hours of interviews and travel for first hand accounts of the type of life Alafair lives, for my first book, The Old Buzzard Had It Coming, I did traditional research on moonshining and early Oklahoma inheritance laws. For the second book, Hornswoggled, I had to find out what happens to a body after it’s been in the water for hours. For The Drop Edge of Yonder, I needed information on a slightly unusual rifle and its ammunition. For my latest, The Sky Took Him, which as just been released from Poisoned Pen Press, I outdid myself. I did huge amounts of research, and it was all my own fault. One fascinating detail lead to another, and I just couldn’t stop. The first three novels are set outside of Boynton, in rural eastern Oklahoma, but for The Sky Took Him, Alafair travels to the big city - Enid, Oklahoma, on the northern plains.

I know Enid. My husband’s family is from there. Enid is an interesting place. It literally sprang up overnight after the Cherokee Strip land run on September 16, 1893. Every year since then, they hold a big festival, Pioneer Days, to celebrate the Run. Pioneer Days is a big deal now, but in 1915, the year the story occurs, it was huge, and I thought it would be interesting to set the tale during the celebration. So I had my characters, an interesting place and situation. Now I have to kill someone.

I know from visiting the Museum of the Cherokee Strip that there was a frenzy of oil exploration in northern Oklahoma during the early part of the 20th Century. The place was covered with wildcat wells. Now, I’m originally from Oklahoma, so I know a little about oil, including the fact that early oil drilling was a very dangerous occupation, and there were all sorts of ways to kill yourself gruesomely on an oil field.

This is an interesting angle. I began to do some research on early oil field exploration and technology, both on the web and at the library. I was reminded that drillers used to remove obstructions from wells by blasting them open with nitroglycerin. It occurred to me that this might be a delightfully explosive way to do someone in.

I wanted to do some research on the properties of nitroglycerin, but I didn’t want to do too much internet research at home on explosives and nitro. I feared that the NSA or Homeland Security would come knocking on my door in the middle of the night. I specifically wanted to know was how nitro was used in oil well drilling in the 1910s, and while I found quite a lot on modern drilling techniques, I could find little on historical techniques in the detail I needed.

This was taking too long. I’m a novelist with a deadline, not a historical researcher writing a dissertation. I needed to ask someone who knew. I began to scan the web for oil industry professional organizations.

Suddenly it hit me. My computer techno-geek brother might not know an oil-derrick from a party hat, but he did happen to be the webmaster for the Society of Petroleum Geologists in Tulsa. I called him up and explained the problem.

At first, he told me he had doubts he could help, since the computer guys and the petroleum engineers didn’t hang out, but he did lunch occasionally with a geologist and would ask him if he had any ideas.

The geologist gave him the title of a book which is all about the multitude of spectacular ways that oil workers in the U.S. have blown themselves to kingdom come with nitroglycerin through history.

Bob’s your uncle.

The Sky Took Him is full of the delicious little details that make a story ring true - an imminent death, a disappearance, a long-hidden family secret, and a hell of an explosion. It’s a crackerjack story.

I’m on to the next novel - intolerance, terrorism, the beginning of the war. And now I have to kill someone…