P.M. Berk

I am having the time of my life writing cozy murder mysteries. Legal writing is plain drudgery. Writing fiction is fun and exhilarating.

I was the primary brief writer in my law firm and also was lead counsel in dozens of jury trials in Chicago. Words were my livelihood. In retirement my wife, Nancy, urged me to continue writing. She suggested I write a novel. A foolish idea, because legal writing is no preparation for writing fiction. When covid started and we were pretty much homebound, I started to fiddle with composing random sentences and paragraphs, a kind of free form writing—just putting down whatever came to mind.

That is what led me to write my first published novel, CROOKED LAKE. My second novel, THE LAST OF THE CLEVENGERS, was published on February 2, 2023. I followed that with MURDER at the COME ON INN, the first book of the Jeremy Pendelton Murder series. That was followed by book two, MURDER at the CAPITOL RACEWAY. Book three, recently published, is MURDER on the FOURTEENTH TEE.

I don’t write from an outline—just wing it, thought to thought. I’m always amazed and often delighted to find out where the story goes and ends.

I now live in Itasca, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, with Nancy. My main interests, outside of writing and reading, are golf and fishing. I spend as much time as possible in the Northwoods of Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.