Author Willo Davis Roberts was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan on May 29, 1928. A few years after graduating high school, she married and began to raise a family. They moved to California and tried to run a dairy farm, but with little success. She went to work at a hospital and wrote on the side to make extra money. Her first novel, Murder at Grand Bay, was published in 1955. During this time, she wrote primarily nurse novels, but switched to suspense when the genre went out of style. The View from the Cherry Tree was originally meant to be an adult novel, but her editor felt it was not at that level and convinced her to sell it as a children's book. It was published in 1975 and started her… career as a children's mystery writer. She wrote a total of ninety-nine children and adult books during her lifetime and won numerous awards including the Mark Twain award for The Girl with the Silver Eyes (1980) and Baby-Sitting Is a Dangerous Job (1985) and the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Megan's Island (1988), The Absolutely True Story of My Visit to Yellowstone with the Terrible Rupes (1994), and Twisted Summer (1996). She died on November 19, 2004 from congestive heart failure.