Kathleen Yasas was born and raised in central New York, and has been writing all of her life. While her body of work has included children’s and nonfiction books, investigative reporting, opinion columns, feature writing, and women’s health issues, she admits that when it comes to fiction, her mind often turns to mystery…and murder.
“There’s nothing like sitting at home on a rainy night, curled in front of the fire with a cup of cocoa, reading about a good old fashioned killing,” she says.
Her latest book, If Thine Eye Be Evil, was inspired by a long-ago murder in northeast Arkansas, where she was once a newspaper reporter. A girl was found dead in a cotton field, her throat cut, and a fellow reporter had to cover the story.
“We were all so young, only just out of college, and my friend the reporter was really freaked out about seeing the dead girl,” she says. “Gloria was her name, and she came back to the office completely pale. I felt so sorry for her I took her out to a steak lunch, which in the end probably wasn’t the best idea considering she liked her sirloin rare.”
That experience lingered for many years until, finally, it emerged as the story of a serial killer stalking young women and, ultimately, the very newspaper reporters trying to track the killer down. The story begins in Arkansas and comes to its shocking conclusion in upstate New York.
Ms. Yasas draws on her familiarity with both the north and the south – and with the newspaper business – to paint a portrait of murder most foul.
“I would never consider myself a ghoulish person,” she says, “but I admit that sometimes I wonder about my own mind. Some people might look at a dock, for example, and write a story about a pleasant family vacation on the lake. When I look at that dock, I don’t think of fishing: I think of someone being pushed off of the dock into the water…and being held under until their face turns blue, their eyes bulging, arms thrashing, gasping for breath but realizing too late that the person holding them down isn’t going to stop, isn’t going to let go until they’re dead.”
At this she shrugs.
Rome
“What can I say? It’s just how my mind works.”
Kathleen has worked in the professional education arena since 1981, both as a writer and an editor. With a degree in journalism, she was city editor of
The Courier News, a daily newspaper in the mid-south, in the late 1970s through the early ‘80s. Relocating to New York City in 1981, she worked for several years as a promotion and public relations writer at Physicians World Communications, and then as promotion director for
Acute Care Medicine, a new publishing venture. Throughout the 1980s, she continued to work as an Erma Bombeck-style columnist for
The Courier News, and continues today to write as a columnist and news contributor for newspapers in upstate New York (The Sherburne News
and The Evening Sun).
Kathleen owns her own medical publishing and conference management company, MSP International, Inc., founded in 1985. She currently is editor of two newsletters, and is the executive director of the World Foundation for Medical Studies in Female Health, a 501(c)(3) non-profit located on Long Island
Over the past 20 years she has written and edited medical books, journals, newsletters, press materials, and corporate brochures in varied specialties, as well as serving as editor and writer for a boating magazine on Long Island and as a contributing writer and editor to published pieces in
Self Magazine, Working Woman, and a special supplement to
The New York Times. She is the author of two books,
Australian Fly (juvenile, published 1998) and The Port Washington Yacht Club: A Centennial Perspective
(non-fiction, published 2005). In 2002 she completed her first novel,
Holliday House, and her second in 2009, If Thine Eye Be Evil. She has also completed a non-fiction work,
Letters to Dianne, which is a compilation of letters written by a Vietnam vet to his sister during his tour of duty in Southeast Asia from 1968-1969.
She is currently working on her next novel, The Question Mark Murders.
“There’s nothing like sitting at home on a rainy night, curled in front of the fire with a cup of cocoa, reading about a good old fashioned killing,” she says.
That experience lingered for many years until, finally, it emerged as the story of a serial killer stalking young women and, ultimately, the very newspaper reporters trying to track the killer down. The story begins in Arkansas and comes to its shocking conclusion in upstate New York. 
Over the past 20 years she has written and edited medical books, journals, newsletters, press materials, and corporate brochures in varied specialties, as well as serving as editor and writer for a boating magazine on Long Island and as a contributing writer and editor to published pieces in
Self Magazine, Working Woman, and a special supplement to
The New York Times. She is the author of two books,
Australian Fly (juvenile, published 1998) and The Port Washington Yacht Club: A Centennial Perspective
(non-fiction, published 2005). In 2002 she completed her first novel,
Holliday House, and her second in 2009, If Thine Eye Be Evil. She has also completed a non-fiction work,
Letters to Dianne, which is a compilation of letters written by a Vietnam vet to his sister during his tour of duty in Southeast Asia from 1968-1969.