After spending his formative years helping run a cottage resort and trailer park after his father died when Linwood was 16, he got his first newspaper job at the Peterborough Examiner, a small Ontario daily. After spending two years in Peterborough, Linwood went to a small suburban paper outside Toronto for another couple of years, and then joined the Toronto Star. He held such positions as assistant city editor, chief copy editor, news editor, and Life section editor, before becoming a columnist in 1993. Since 1993, Linwood’s been writing three pieces a week, and become one of the paper’s most popular writers.In 2004, he launched his mystery series about an anxiety-ridden, know-it-all, pain-in-the-butt father by the name of Zack Walker. Bad Move, the first book, has since been followed byBad Guys, Lone Wolf, andStone Rain. He’s also very busy on the speaking circuit, using his keen insights to spot what’s funny in our everyday lives, and making sport of the shenanigans of our elected officials. Linwood was born in the United States but moved to Canada just before turning four years old when his father, a commercial artist whose illustrations of cars appeared in Life, Look and Saturday Evening Post before photography took over, accepted a position with an advertising agency north of the border. Linwood first became interested in writing around the time he was in Grade 3, and can recall, in Grade 6, when the principal took him aside and suggested that if he spent a little less time dreaming up stories, he might do a little bit better in arithmetic. He attended Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, where he obtained an Honours B.A. in English by reading the Coles Notes (Cliffs Notes for U.S. readers) on some of the greatest literary works ever written. He was fortunate to have some very fine mentors; in particular, the celebrated Canadian author Margaret Laurence, whom Linwood first met when she served as writer-in-residence at Trent, and Kenneth Millar, who, under the name Ross Macdonald, wrote the acclaimed series of mystery novels featuring detective Lew Archer. It was at Trent that he met the woman who would become his wife. He and Neetha, who teaches kindergarten, have been married for more than 25 years. They have two children, Spencer and Paige.

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