Before becoming a full-time writer, Darryl Nyznyk (pronounced NIZ-nik) practiced law for two decades. As an attorney, he dealt with developers and environmental groups like the California Coastal Commission and the Sierra Club. After working on a case involving the Sierra Club, Nyznyk purchased a book called WILD AT LAW to read more about the group, and became enthralled with their work. He was especially drawn to the story of the Sierra Club's efforts to stop Walt Disney from building the ultimate ski resort in the Mineral King Valley of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Southern California. That's when the idea for his latest novel, an environmental legal thriller called THE CONDOR SONG… (June 2013) hit him. "I became interested in the entire concept of the various sides of the debate of good and evil," says Nyznyk. "Here you have Walt Disney, an honorary member of the Sierra Club, trying to build an environmentally friendly development in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and he is opposed by the Sierra Club on the basis that no matter what Disney did to make the project environmentally friendly, it simply couldn't be done." Nyznyk was raised in a middle-class family in a Los Angeles suburb. His upbringing didn't prepare him for campus life at UC-Santa Barbara during the anti-war demonstrations of the early 1970s. It was a wild time in a wild place, and it ultimately ingrained in him a sense of individualism, tempered by the social consciousness that helped shape his core and now forms the foundation of his writing. After graduation, Nyznyk continued on to receive his Magna Cum Laude Law Degree at the University of San Diego. Family and a wide-ranging law practice consumed most of the next 20 years of his life. For nine years after private practice, he was general counsel and then president of a Southern California real estate development company. Since then, he has gone into occasional teaching and full-time writing. His first novel was a political thriller titled THE THIRD TERM and his second a Christmas novel titled MARY'S SON, A Tale of Christmas. An Amazon best-seller, MARY'S SON is also a three-time Gold recipient of the Mom's Choice Awards: Most Inspirational/Motivational book for Juvenile and Young Adult readers and Best Fiction/Literature for Adults. Father to four grown daughters, Nyznyk lives in Manhattan Beach, California with his wife Loretta.