A one-paragraph “about the author” is below, for press use, but I’ll start with the long form.

The made-for-Book-TV parts of my biography mostly occurred some time ago. I grew up in central Missouri, went to school at Brown, and then lived abroad, off and on, for several years. Much of that time I worked in Tokyo, starting as an English teacher and ending as a salaryman at Fusosha Publishing. Between jobs I traveled widely in Asia, on the cheap -- “goat class,” as they say in Indonesia. I’ve hitchhiked through northeast Asia, taken a freighter to Bora Bora, overlanded to Tibet, backpacked across Tasmania, and climbed Mt. Kinabalu on Borneo.

Once that was out of my system, in my early thirties, I settled down in Boston. I worked briefly as an ambulance EMT, joined the food co-op, started bicycling again, and eventually found a job as finance director for a division of the Japanese firm Oki Electric. In 1998 I went back to school for a masters degree at MIT’s Sloan School, then joined Fidelity Investments as a VP in their internet strategy unit.

I also got married, and when our daughter was four months old, we decided that I would quit to stay home while my wife went back to work full time. Three years later our son was born. I’ve now been absent from the workaday world for nearly a decade, with no regrets. Writing gives me something to do at the computer; hanging around the park after school and cooking and generally puttering about fills the day. We are blessed to live in a close, walkable community, where I’ll run into someone to say hi to most every time I go out the door.

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Short-form bio:

Mike Wiecek is the author of EXIT STRATEGY, which was shortlisted for the ITW’s Thriller Award in 2006. His short stories have received wide recognition, including a Shamus Award. In younger days Mike traveled widely in Asia, including several years in Japan. He now lives outside Boston with his wife and two children.