Margaret Dardess

Margaret Dardess http://www.margaretdardess.com/ https://www.facebook.com/margaretdardessauthor/ Born and raised just outside of New York City, Margaret Dardess has lived and travelled across several continents, landing at last in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where she probably should have been all along. She is the daughter of an artist and a poet, who were determined to steer their only daughter away from a life in the arts. For many years they were successful. Margaret returned to New York after graduation from Connecticut College to study Japanese history at Columbia University, and after a brief teaching career at the University of Illinois, went on to tackle the law. When she finally stopped going to school, she set off on a journey, masquerading as an international trade lawyer, a corporate communications executive and a university administrator until at last she cast her parents’ warnings to the wind and began to write. Brutal Silence is Margaret’s debut thriller. After meeting a woman who escaped from human traffickers and hearing all that the poor woman endured, Margaret was so angry that she had to tell others about it. She chose to write an action-packed thriller as a way to make the issue of human trafficking come alive through fiction. Brutal Silence is the story of Alex Harrington, a resilient and gutsy young Southern woman who takes on human traffickers in her North Carolina town and in Mexico and wins. Margaret lives with her husband and three and a half cats in Chapel Hill and Wilmington, North Carolina. She is hard at work on a second book that will take Alex Harrington to Margaret’s own native New York City and back to Mexico where Alex tries to build a new life as an international relief worker only to find that those she trusts the most are motivated more by greed than by charity.