About Sue Merrell

Sue Merrell has been a journalist for 40 years, retiring from The Grand Rapids Press in 2009. Since 2000 she has specialized in covering live theatre and other entertainment events. She continues to review professional theater for Encore Michigan.

Her memoir, Laughing for a Living, reveals the joys and headaches of interviewing such stars as Tony Curtis, Jerry Lewis, Cary Grant, Bette Midler, Molly Ringwald and Julie Newmar. Well, somebody had to do it!

Sue’s earlier career in Illinois inspired her second book, Great News Town, a fictional mystery-thriller loosely based on a series of murders which occurred in 1983 when she was assistant city-editor at The Joliet Herald-News. This launched The Jordan Daily News Mysteries.  Sequels, One Shoe Off and Full Moon Friday are set in the same fictional Chicago-area newsroom.

Before Illinois, Sue worked for newspapers in Texas and South Carolina. Like her character Josie Braun, she is divorced. Her son, Ryan Wallace, designs the covers for her books and manages her website.

Sue lives on a lake just outside Grand Rapids. For fun she makes mudpies in her basement pottery studio and tinkers with a mountain dulcimer. In the winter she disappears to the Florida Keys. Her latest hobby is genealogy where she discovered President James Madison is a cousin.