Beneath a Scarlet Sky (Sullivan) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—June 28, 1958
• Where—Medfield, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Hamilton College; M.S., Northwestern University
• Currently—lives in Bozeman, Montana


Mark Sullivan is an American author best known for his mystery and suspense novels, including five co-written with James Patterson.

Sullivan was born and raised in Medford, Massacusetts, a suburb of Boston. According to his website, his favorite job of all time was as a teen selling souvenirs at Fenway Park. He left the baseball park for Hamilton College where he received his B.A., after which he joined the Peach Corp. He spent two years in Africa, living among the Tuareg nomads of the Sahara Desert and teaching English to their children.

On returning to the States, Sullivan earned an M.S. in Journalism at the Medill School at Northwestern University. For the next decade or so, he worked as a financial, political, and investigative journalist. Most of that time was spent at The San Diego Tribune, where he won awards for a series on the children of addicts and another for his inside view of funeral home conglomerates.

But by the age of 30, Sullivan decided he needed to follow his childhood dream — to become a novelist. Writing in his spare time, he published stories in literary journals.

In 1990, he took a big risk — a leave of absence from the newsroom — and headed to Utah and Wyoming where he immersed himself in the culture of extreme skiers. Out of that experience came his first novel, The Fall Line. Published in 1994, his debut garnered a "Notable Book of the Year" listing from the New York Times.

With the publication of The Purification Ceremony in 1996, Sullivan's fiction career took off. The novel received widespread praise and was a finalist for the Edgar Allen Poe Award. Since then, he has written over a dozen novels, including those with Patterson.

An avid skier and athlete, Sullivan lives in Montana with his wife. (Adapted from the author's website.)