Nathan Walpow writes the Joe Portugal mystery series. The most recent entry is The Manipulated. Nathan was born and raised in New York City, arrived in Los Angeles in 1979, and squandered the 1980s trying to make it as an actor. His fifteen minutes of fame came in 1985, when he was a five-times-undefeated champion on Jeopardy! In the third Joe Portugal adventure, the rock-and-roll-midlife-crisis-crime-novel One Last Hit, Joe picks up his electric guitar after a decades-long hiatus and tries to put his teenage band back together. Life imitates art: soon after the book was published, Nathan restrung his 1968 Fender Coronado II and began rocking once more, soon appearing at B.B. King's Blues Club with a Procol Harum covers band. He now owns twelve guitars and innumerable other musical gadgets. Other Joe Portugal mysteries include Death of an Orchid Lover and The Cactus Club Killings. Nathan's short story "Push Comes to Shove" appeared in The Best American Mystery Stories 2001. He recently co-edited the anthology LAndmarked for Murder. He is a former president of the Southern California chapter of Mystery Writers of America. Nathan designed and maintains the A Merry Band of Murderers website.