About the Author

Cathy L. Patrenos is an award-winning author who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona where she pursued a career in nursing. After completing her nursing boards, she embarked on a thirty-day expedition in Africa, which turned into a year, and decades later was the inspiration for her memoir, The Splendor and Chaos of Africa. Having been sufficiently bitten by the wanderlust bug, soon after returning home from Africa, she again ventured out on an overland journey through Europe to Istanbul and across the Middle East to India, following what was then known as the “hippie trail,” a route that soon thereafter closed to travelers at the start of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It was an enlightening experience, exploring the mysteries of cultures so different from our own, a rare experience, later to become the substance of travel legend. That journey inspired Cathy to write her adventure/crime novel, The Silk Road Score.

Upon returning from her travels, Cathy’s nursing career took her to California, specializing in critical care nursing. Desiring a career change after years of nursing, she completed law school and became a medical malpractice defense attorney in Los Angeles, specializing in the representation of physicians and other health care providers.

Although Cathy changed her profession from nursing, she remained a captain in the Air Force Reserves Nurse Corps. She is a war veteran having served as a tactical flight nurse in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm. Upon returning to Los Angeles after the war, she continued her work as a lawyer, and over the years discovered a passion for writing, other than legal briefs, that is.

Moving with her husband, also an attorney, from Los Angeles to lovely Amador County wine country in Northern California, together they opened a wine tour company, which Cathy operated for several years. She now devotes most of her spare time to research and writing, which she says keeps her out of trouble. The concept for her award-winning historical fiction-novel, The Comfort Bearer, came about after seeing a television news story about a lawsuit brought by Japanese citizens over a monument acknowledging comfort women (enforced sex slaves) that was placed in a park in Glendale, Los Angeles County, where Cathy had worked as a lawyer for many years. They wanted the monument removed. During her extensive research, she discovered that approximately 200,000 girls and women were taken from the occupied areas of Asia over the course of the war, many by coercion and trickery.

Her heart being in Africa, she has returned many times and in fact her husband proposed at the Mount Kenya Safari Club. They live in Sutter Creek, a California Gold Rush town in the foothills of the beautiful Sierra Mountains.