User:Georgenik/sandbox

Biography
John Verdon is a novelist, in 2010 he publishes his first book Think of a Number. The debut of Dave Gurney detective book series.

In early life, John Verdon was an advertising executive from New York. After his retirement from advertising writing, like Dave and Madeleine Gurney -the main characters of his first series book- he and his wife decided to left big city and move to somewhere completely different. They chose the western foothill region of the Catskill Mountains.

John Verdon was born at 1942 in the United States. John always wanted to be a writer, but he also wanted to make a living. So he became an advertising writer. Eventually, pursuing promotions into a job that had very little to do with anything he was good at. He left advertising to do something completely different.

He studied woodworking and started building Shaker-style furniture, an occupation he immersed his self for ten years. Along the way he also got a commercial pilot’s license, as an alternate route to the horizon. When his wife left her teaching job in New York City, they moved to the country — to a beautiful part of the western Catskill Mountains. After their move, he began reading a lot more, mostly mysteries. He discovered that he truly loves classic detective stories, in all their varieties from Conan Doyle to Ross Macdonald to Reginald Hill.

Then, his wife, Naomi, inspired him to write his own mystery novel. That takes him two years to complete his first book, Think of a Number. Its subsequent success in the marketplace, as well as with critics, astounded him. His agent and his publisher urged him to write a second novel featuring the same central characters. The result of their encouragement was a book of series; a retired detective, Dave Gurney. His books are translated into several international languages.

Criticism
''“If one read this novel with no knowledge of the writer’s background, one would guess that he is a retired policeman or prosecutor. It is quite hard to believe that Verdon has no personal knowledge of the bleak and challenging world that he writes about so expertly in this work."'' New York Journal of Books

“Verdon is masterly at keeping Gurney a step ahead of the reader.”  New York Times