Eleanor Taylor Bland was born in Boston, Massachusetts on December 31, 1944. She married a sailor when she was fourteen years old. She received a bachelor's degree in accounting and education from Southern Illinois University in 1981. She worked as an accountant at Abbot Laboratories until her retirement in 1999. In the early 1970s, she was diagnosed with Gardner syndrome and fought several bouts with cancer over the years. Her first novel, Dead Time, was published in 1992. She wrote the Marti MacAlister Mystery series. During her career, she received a Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award and a Chester Himes Mystery Fiction Award. She died on June 2, 2010 at the age of 65.