Madelle began her engineering career in the early 80s in Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Her job took her to most of the tiny communities speckled across the vast Arctic. After the birth of her son and one-too-many close calls in a small plane, she decided a regular job south of the 60th parallel would be prudent. However, she vowed to write a romance one day that captured the northerners’ heroic and adventurous spirit and her deep love of the north.

The spark(le) for her debut novel, Diamond Lust, was the astonishing discovery of high quality diamonds in Canada’s far north. A geologist named Charles Fipke announced the first diamond deposit in 1991 and became a very rich man. Three years later the young, beautiful exploration geologist, Eira Thomas, catapulted to heroine status, at least in the mining sector, with her discovery of one of the world’s richest diamond deposits. Matthew Hart’s book Diamond describes how Eira’s exploration crew drilled a kimberlite core that split to reveal an embedded two carat rough diamond – an incredible fluke¹ which eventually led to the construction of the Diavik Diamond Mine on that very site. Today several mines across northern Canada will produce billions of dollars worth of high grade diamonds, making Canada the third largest source in the world.

When not at her day job as a senior engineer and manager with the federal public service, Madelle hangs out with her husband and three cats and writes. She completed four manuscripts and won or placed in several contests prior to publication. Her work in progress, For Love and Money, is about an engraver of U.S. currency who is forced to hide out under the protection of a damaged ex-military body guard while she waits to testify against a counterfeiting ring.

1. Kimberlite drill core would generally contain only garnet and other minerals that might indicate the presence of diamonds. Think of the drill as a tiny pipe that is pushed into a huge bowl of berry-studded gelatine and pulled out filled with a thin cylinder of the content. The probability of the pipette picking up a piece of fruit is low. Similarly, it is extremely unlikely that a drill core would contain a diamond. [↩]