Joan Del Monte
author · speaker · teacher
Joan Del Monte was a featured author at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C. in September 2007. She is also a multi-faceted woman, and has owned an antique shop, a real estate agency, and art gallery in Venice. She taught courses in antiques at UCLA extension and the California State College system; lectured on antiques on radio and wrote a bibliography of small antiques for the Los Angeles Public Library.
Joan taught a course in writing the mystery novel at Santa Monica College, which she called “A Guide to the Pitfalls, From Someone Who Has Fallen Into Most of Them”. She sold the movie rights to her first mystery “Magic Angel Ate a Pickle” and has a B.S. from Columbia University and an M.A. from U.C.L.A. She is a frequent public speaker on her books and the writer’s life.
She has three books in print:
PLONK GOES THE WEASEL takes place in a small redwood town. A film company has ripped them off and the residents go on a dogged hunt for unthinkable and truly wicked revenge.
The second novel DEATH HAD A YELLOW THUMB deals with the counterfeiting of saffron, the world’s most expensive spice, and is set in San Pedro, California and features a vagabond spice, missing ships and murder.
Joan’s third mystery, MUD BLOOD– Murder in the Sacramento Delta is set in the Sacramento Delta of California and was awarded Editor’s Choice by iUniverse and was a Eric Hoffer Award Finalist.
Joan currently lives on the Venice Canals in Southern California and summers in the Northern California redwoods.
A fourth novel is underway.