From small-town Midwest roots, John Ritter bounced around America growing up—Kentucky, Texas, Wyoming, Southern California. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas, interrupted by two years of hitchhiking in the Southwest and work as a carpenter’s helper and meat cutter.
He began a reporting career at two upstate New York newspapers the summer Nixon resigned. Then came a short stint in Phoenix at the Arizona Republic before hiring on at start-up USA TODAY in Washington.He spent twenty-eight years there, as an editor on the national desk, then as a general-assignment reporter handling both breaking news and in-depth stories about the environment, education, aviation, and politics. He and a colleague were named 1995 Pulitzer Prize finalists in investigative reporting.
A move to the Bay Area as a national correspondent found Ritter on the road up and down the West Coast and throughout the mountain West. He left journalism in 2009 to write fiction and currently splits time between Northern California and Southeast Asia. Fatal Conceit is his first published manuscript.
