ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Searles grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where the snow is plentiful, the people are tough, and the pasties are delicious. Always a voracious reader, she could often be found sitting by a stack of library books in the ice rink while her brother played endless amounts of hockey. Through books like Lloyd Alexander's excellent Vesper Holly series she discovered an interest in foreign languages and travel, and so in college she majored in German and Political Science and moved to Munich promptly upon graduation.

While living in Germany, Rachel studied Chinese at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, cooked fajitas for the masses at a student restaurant, and typed up reams of dictation at a patent law firm. She met a nice Turkish boy and they moved to California together, where she received a masters in journalism from UC Berkeley that she never used. She found work instead at a company called Google, and the nice Turkish boy (now her husband) became a rocket scientist, which gave Rachel the opportunity to watch lots of heart-pounding rocket launches over the years that followed. In 2010 she started writing what would become THE LOST PLANET, which was published in 2014, followed by the sequel THE STOLEN MOON in 2015.

Rachel lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and two clingy cats. She still loves to read, and is currently hard at work on more novels.