Cheryl L. Reed is an author and former journalist. She has shadowed dark and mysterious characters-from cops to murder suspects, cloistered nuns to girls doing drugs. Reed's debut novel, Poison Girls, is a thriller about girls from Chicago's political families playing a deadly game involving opioids. Poison Girls won the Chicago Writers' Association Book of the Year Award. Reed's book of nonfiction, Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns, chronicles her bizarre journey of living with religious women in convents off and on for four years. Reed is a former editor and reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times and other publications. She is a two-time recipient of the U.S. State Department's Fulbright Scholar grant to Eastern Europe. She currently lives in the Chesapeake Bay area of Virginia where she is at work on a forthcoming suspense novel, Map of My Escape. Visit her at cherylreed.com