By Amy Shojai

Twenty-three years ago Cathy Scott worked as a secretary at Pacific Bell. “No offense to big corporations,” Cathy says, “but they have a tendency to kind of suck the passion out of you.  I always wanted to be a writer and I saw that slipping away from me.”

So Cathy quit her day job and took a buyout to fund her leap of faith. “People told me I was nuts,” Cathy says. She lived lean like a poor college student for the next two years, got her degree, and wrote for anyone who would have her. As she gathered clips, Cathy set a goal to land a job with a daily newspaper in five years. She made it in 3½.

“The Las Vegas Sun offered me a job,” Cathy says. “Then Tupac Shakur was killed on my watch, and that was my first book—THE KILLING OF TUPAC SHAKUR.” Her second book, THE MURDER OF BIGGIE SMALLS, further established her as a bestselling true crime writer.
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Gary C. King’s Rage tells the story of Darren Mack, a man who had it all. A Beautiful home in Reno. A lovely wife. Three children. And a million-dollar business. Then his wife Charla filled for divorce, winning a large settlement in a heated courtroom battle.

According to friends, Mack was ‘angry’. They had no idea how far his fury would take him. Over the next year, the rage only intensified. Finally, Darren Mack snapped, stabbing and killing his ex-wife in her condo. Hours later, he stalked and shot their divorce judge in broad daylight.
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In the new book THE MEASURE OF MADNESS-Inside the Disturbed and Disturbing Criminal Mind (Citadel Press/July 2010), forensic psychologist Dr. Cheryl Paradis draws back the curtain on that fascinating world and revisits twenty-one of the most intriguing, puzzling, and challenging cases she has handled in her multifaceted, twenty-five year career including that of a battered woman, a psychotic arsonist, an accused cannibal and a wide range of liars. Paradis relays these real-life whodunits with much of the dialogue relayed verbatim from her records and presents a compelling account of the relationships between mental illness and violence, innocence and guilt, criminal and victim, and individual and society.
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