Douglas Munson, also known as Mercedes Lambert, was an American educator, attorney, and author. She was the author of three well-regarded novels that explored the hard edges of Los Angeles at the turn of the 21st century.
Background
Douglas Munson was born on February 17, 1948, in Crossville, Tennessee, United States. Named Douglas for an uncle who died in World War II, Munson was the only child of a newspaperman who was transferred across the country from paper to paper.
Education
In college, at the University of New Mexico, Douglas majored in Latin American studies. This was followed by a year spent living in Ecuador. She then returned to California and studied law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Career
After her graduation, Douglas became an attorney in the Los Angeles criminal courts. Most of her legal career was spent in dependency court, where children who have been removed from their parent's custody because of severe abuse, neglect, or abandonment move through the legal system.
In 1990, Douglas published a novel called El Niño. The book was well-received by critics and Douglas went on to publish two mystery novels under the name of Mercedes Lambert, Dogtown in 1991, and Soultown in 1996, which featured two women detectives. She completed a third novel in the series, Ghosttown, which remained unpublished during her lifetime.
After leaving the legal profession, Douglas taught creative writing and journaling at the University of California, Los Angeles. She lived briefly in Washington State and San Francisco, and after completing a program to teach English as a second language, moved to the Czech Republic where she taught English to soldiers, missionaries, and mink farmers. After being diagnosed with cancer (she had successfully fought breast cancer while writing El Niño in the late 1980s), Douglas returned to the United States in 2001 and sought medical treatment in Connecticut.
Four years after her death, Ghosttown, the third and final Whitney Logan mystery, was published by Five Star Mystery; in the Spring of 2008, the first two Whitney Logan mysteries - Dogtown and Soultown - were reprinted in a single edition by Stark House.