Owen Laukkanen was born in Vancouver. After graduating from university in 2006, he answered an ad on Craigslist for a summer job at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas as a “poker tournament reporter” for a poker website. At the end of the summer, they offered him a full-time job, and for the next three years, he traveled around the world, reporting from the most luxurious casinos of Monaco and Macau and Australia to the sketchiest card rooms of California and Atlantic City. In 2009, having seen his fill, he quit to concentrate on fiction.
His previous Stevens and Windermere novels are The Professionals, Criminal Enterprise, Kill Fee, The Stolen Ones, and The Watcher in the Wall. The Professionals was nominated for the Barry and International Thriller Writers awards for best first novel, as well as the Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel: New Voices Award. Criminal Enterprise was nominated for the ITW Award for best novel, and The Stolen Ones for the Barry Award.