KAREN ODDEN received her Ph.D. in English literature from New York University and has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. She has contributed essays and chapters to books and journals, including Studies in the Novel, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Victorian Crime, Madness, and Sensation; she has written introductions for Barnes and Noble editions of books by Dickens and Trollope; and she currently serves as an Assistant Editor for the academic journal Victorian Literature and Culture. She freely admits she might be more at home in nineteenth-century London than today, especially when she tries to do anything complicated on her iPhone. She resides in Arizona with her husband, two teenage children, and a ridiculously cute beagle named Rosy. A Lady in the Smoke is her first novel, and she is currently at work on a second, set in 1880s London, featuring an Inspector from Scotland Yard, and with a plot that wakes her up at night.