Michael Robotham

Michael Robotham (born 9 November 1960) is an Australian crime fiction writer. His daughter is the ARIA and APRA Award nominated songwriter, producer and musician, Alex Hope.

Career

Robotham was born in Casino, New South Wales, and went to school in Gundagai and Coffs Harbour. In February 1979 he began a journalism cadetship on the Sydney afternoon newspaper The Sun.

In 1986, he went to London where he worked as a reporter and sub-editor for various UK national newspapers before becoming a staff feature writer on The Mail on Sunday in 1989. He rose to become deputy features editor before resigning in May 1993. He then became a ghostwriter, collaborating on fifteen "autobiographies" for people in the arts, politics, the military and sport. Twelve of these titles became Sunday Times bestsellers. In 1996 he returned to Australia with his family and continued writing full-time. In 2002, a partial manuscript of his first novel, The Suspect, became the subject of a bidding war at the London Book Fair. It was later translated into 22 languages and sold over a million copies around the world.

Lost

Lost may refer to:

Cinema and television

Literature

Music

Albums

Novel

A novel is a long narrative, normally in prose, which describes fictional characters and events, usually in the form of a sequential story.

The genre has also been described as possessing "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years". This view sees the novel's origins in Classical Greece and Rome, medieval, early modern romance, and the tradition of the novella. The latter, an Italian word used to describe short stories, supplied the present generic English term in the 18th century. Ian Watt, however, in The Rise of the Novel (1957) suggests that the novel first came into being in the early 18th century,

Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, is frequently cited as the first significant European novelist of the modern era; the first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605.

The romance is a closely related long prose narrative. Walter Scott defined it as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents", whereas in the novel "the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society". However, many romances, including the historical romances of Scott,Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, are also frequently called novels, and Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". Romance, as defined here, should not be confused with the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo."

Tess Gerritsen

Tess Gerritsen (born June 12, 1953) is an American novelist and retired physician.

Early life

Tess Gerritsen is the child of a Chinese immigrant and a Chinese-American seafood chef. While growing up in San Diego, California, Gerritsen often dreamt of writing her own Nancy Drew novels. Her first name is Terry; she decided to feminize it when she was a writer of romance novels. Although she longed to be a writer, her family had reservations about the sustainability of a writing career, prompting Gerritsen to choose a career in medicine. In 1975, Gerritsen graduated from Stanford University with a BA in anthropology, intrigued by the ranges of human behavior. She went on to study medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. She received her medical degree in 1979 and started work as a physician in Honolulu, Hawaii.

While on maternity leave, she submitted a short story to a statewide fiction contest in the magazine Honolulu. Her story, "On Choosing the Right Crack Seed," won first prize and she received $500. The story focused on a young male reflecting on a difficult relationship with his mother. Gerritsen claimed the story allowed her to deal with her own childhood turmoil, including the repeated suicide attempts of her mother.

Lost and found

A lost and found (American English and Canadian English), lost property (British English), or lost articles (also Canadian English) is an office in a public building or area where people can go to retrieve lost articles that may have been found by others. Frequently found at museums, amusement parks and schools, a lost and found will typically be a clearly marked box or room in a location near the main entrance. This is in contrast to Old Dominion University's centralization of lost and found management through the use of technology to better manage the return-to-owner process.

Some lost and found offices will try to contact the owners of any lost items if there are any personal identifiers available. Practically all will either sell, give or throw away items after a certain period has passed to clear their storage.

History

First advertising of this kind appears on papyruses in Ancient Greece and Rome. In Japan, the lost-and-found property system dates to a code written in the year 718. The first modern lost and found office was organized in Paris in 1805. Napoleon ordered his prefect of police to establish it as a central place "to collect all objects found in the streets of Paris", according to Jean-Michel Ingrandt, who was appointed the office's director in 2001. However, it was not until 1893 that Louis Lépine, then prefect of police, organized efforts to actively track down the owners of lost items.