Gene Ayres has a long and eclectic history as a writer, filmmaker, columnist and film critic in New York, Florida, and Hollywood, writing for Harper’s Magazine, Running Times, Worldwatch Magazine, PBS, various newspapers, commercial television and animation studios, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers. His award winning Tony Lowell Mystery series from St. Martin's Press will be back in publication after a decade beginning with his fifth novel, this coming year.

From the time his mysteries were taken out of print until his travels abroad he spent the next decade raising his son as a single parent, researching a forthcoming book about Shakespeare, then accepted a position for three years living and working in China as a "Foreign Expert," teaching English at a major state university in Harbin. His recent book on these adventures, Inside the New China, published by Transaction Publishing of Rutgers University, is available wherever books are sold.

His newest book Il Libro Segredo di Shakespeare, a literary thriller in the Da Vinci Code tradition, has just been published in Rome under his pseudonym John Underwood, and is already a bestseller. (See The Shakespeare Chronicles page.) This book has now been translated in six languages, but has yet to find a U.S. or U.K. publisher. Stand by for updates on that score, as this is a literary first: a foreign translation as bestseller for a work unpublished in the author's native English language.

Meanwhile, he lives and works in Seattle, with his wife and daughter.