Kathryn Lane Award-Winning Author of the Nikki Garcia Mystery Series Coming-of-Age Mystery about a Math Prodigy
Kathryn Lane is originally from northern Mexico. She married at a young age and moved to a cattle station in the Outback of Australia, a unique experience that taught her many life lessons. After 3 ½ years in the Outback, she returned to Mexico.
A year later, she moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to continue her art studies at the University of New Mexico, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. Kathryn worked for a short period as a starving artist but soon gave up the art world and enrolled in an MBA program at UNM’s Anderson School of Management.
To earn a living, she became a certified public accountant and enjoyed a career in international finance with Johnson & Johnson. This job took her around the globe.
After two decades with J&J, Kathryn took an early retirement from her position as VP of Finance for Latin America and the Caribbean to become a fiction writer. Her extensive travel in other countries inspires her to place her protagonist, private investigator Nikki Garcia, in various countries. She is currently writing Lost in Athens, the 8th novel in the award-winning Nikki Garcia Mystery Series. This novel will be published in February 2027. She continues to travel, now for on-site research purposes for her novels. To date, Kathryn has visited 101 countries.
In addition to the Nikki Garcia Mystery Series, she has written the award-winning coming-of-age mystery about a math prodigy, Stolen Diary. This novel has been translated into Spanish under the title Secretos Robados.
Echoes from the River – a coming-of-age mystery inspired by Kathryn’s experiences in Australia will be published on August 17, 2026.
Desaparecido en la Sierra – the Spanish translation of Rage in the Wilderness (book #5 in the Nikki Garcia mysteries) will be published in September of 2026.
Kathryn and her husband, Bob Hurt, live in The Woodlands, Texas. When Kathryn is not writing or traveling with Bob, you can usually find her cooking up a storm in her kitchen.
You had a wonderful international career in finance with Johnson & Johnson and traded corporate boardrooms and airline travel for writing mystery novels. Share your backstory.
People often ask me how I went from a career in international finance to writing mystery novels. The connection is more natural than it might seem. My life has always been driven by curiosity, adventure, and a love of exploring different worlds.
Let me start at the beginning. I grew up in Mexico, where my mother homeschooled me so she and I could travel with my father as he visited customers throughout the country. Those years shaped me. One of my favorite memories is from a business trip when one of my father’s customers gave me a baby goat. For the rest of the journey, that little goat rode in the back seat with me. I was convinced I’d found heaven!
Then for fourth grade, my parents enrolled me in a bilingual school where we lived. It was a traumatic change for me. Not the school. It was wonderful, but the change meant an end to our travels. I was heartbroken. I’d been bitten by the travel bug, and I decided that when I grew up, I would find a way to see the world. I also loved to draw and paint and imagined myself growing up to become an artist.
Life, of course, had other plans.
I married in my late teens, left the university, and moved to the Australian Outback. That experience eventually became the inspiration for Echoes from the River, my latest novel, which I will discuss shortly.
Living in the Outback was transformative. It was such a remote and demanding environment, and I felt terribly lonely there. Yet, it taught me self-reliance, independence, resilience, and creative problem-solving.
After three years in Australia, we returned to Mexico and lived on my former father-in-law’s western-street movie set in Durango. It was during the heyday of classic westerns, and stars like John Wayne, Ann-Margret, Katharine Hepburn, Kris Kristofferson, Harry Bellafonte, Sidney Potier, and Ruby Dee all filmed there. It sounds glamourous, especially after the Outback, but it was also when my marriage ended.
Tell us about your challenges along your journey.
The Outback had challenged me to the core, yet I was a stronger, better person when I returned to Mexico. It was a shock when my marriage failed. And I was not quite twenty-four! It was time to rebuild my life. So, I moved to the United States with my young son. I completed my Fine Arts degree at the University of New Mexico (UNM) and worked as a starving artist. After a very hard year of trying to survive as an artist, I enrolled in UNM’s MBA program, became a CPA, and spent three years in public accounting.
But that travel bug had never left me.
I decided to pursue a career with a multi-national corporation thinking it would allow me to see the world. And it absolutely did. I joined Johnson & Johnson as an entry-level auditor. I was soon traveling to England, India, Japan, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America. I’d found heaven again! My global career gave me the opportunity to work with people from countless cultures. And I was helping to solve complex business challenges.
Over the years, that entry-level role grew into opportunities I could never have imagined. I served as CFO of Johnson & Johnson’s affiliate in Mexico City and later in Buenos Aires, Argentina, before becoming Vice President of Finance for the Latin America and Caribbean region.
Your years of traveling the world sparked your inspiration for setting your Nikki Garcia Mystery Series in exotic locations around the world. Take us through your series and the themes throughout.
Without the opportunity to travel the world and immerse myself in different cultures, the Nikki Garcia Mystery Series would not exist. Every novel is inspired by a place I’ve experienced firsthand, and every destination becomes as much a character as the people in the story.
The series began with Waking Up in Medellín. I had fallen in love with Colombia, with the warmth of its people, its breathtaking mountains, fertile valleys, and beautiful coastlines. I wanted readers to experience the country the way I did, beyond the stereotypes. Protagonist Nikki Garcia goes to Colombia to investigate corporate fraud, which gives her a believable reason to be in South America.
By the second novel, Danger in the Coyote Zone, Nikki has left corporate life behind to become a private investigator based in Miami. She’s hired to travel to Mexico in search of a missing girl.
Revenge in Barcelona grew out of my fascination with Barcelona’s extraordinary architecture and rich artistic heritage.
Missing in Miami takes readers from Miami to Havana, weaving a mystery with a medical connection while exploring the deep ties between those two cities.
My love of New Mexico inspired Rage in the Wilderness, while Murder in Monte Carlo combines two of my passions, which are still the art world and international travel. The story begins in Venice, Italy, with art theft and concludes amid the glamour of Monte Carlo.
The setting for Terror in Desert Skies is the International Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, an event in which I was part of the chase crew for a hot air balloon. This was during my college days.
Most recently, my husband, Bob Hurt, and I traveled to Greece and Malta so I could do on-site research for Lost in Athens, the eighth Nikki Garcia mystery, that I’m currently writing.
One theme connects every book in the series: I want readers to travel with Nikki to solve a mystery while never leaving their favorite chair. My hope is they’ll enjoy the tidbits of history, culture, food, landscapes, and people woven into each mystery novel. When readers finish, they have helped to solve the mystery, and they’ve taken an unforgettable journey with Nikki Garcia.
Your latest novel, Echoes from the River, a coming-of-age story woven together with a family mystery, will be released in August. Tell us about how The Outback has made a profound imprint on your life.
The Australian Outback changed the trajectory of my life in ways I didn’t fully appreciate until years later. I was young, impressionable, and suddenly living in a world that couldn’t have been more different than the close-knit Mexican community where I’d grown up.
Though I missed my family, my friends, and my country, I was captivated by the Australian landscape and wildlife. I’d never seen crocodiles, kangaroos, koalas, or the incredible variety of birds, such as cockatoos, brolgas, and emus to name a few that were part of everyday life in the Northern Territory. Everything felt wild and adventuresome, like I was on a special kind of safari.
But alongside that wonder came profound isolation. When my former husband and the stockmen left for muster camp, I often spent weeks alone at the cattle station. My only connection to the outside world was a two-way radio. My nearest neighbors lived two hours away.
Looking back, it’s remarkable how quickly isolation teaches self-reliance. When I faced a couple of genuine emergencies, and there was no one else to depend on, I simply focused on solving the problem. That experience gave me the confidence I’ve carried with me for the rest of my life. It taught me that I was far more capable than I’d ever imagined.
At the same time, I met extraordinary people whose resilience, generosity, and deep connection to the land left a lasting impression. Their stories stayed with me long after I left Australia.
Those memories became the foundation for Echoes from the River. The novel is entirely fictional, but it is rooted in the world I knew and the emotions I experienced. I want readers to feel both the breathtaking beauty and the immense loneliness of the Outback as it existed in the 1970s.
One of my favorite characters is Alice, an Aboriginal woman, who befriends Francesca, the protagonist. Alice introduces her to the land through the ancient Aboriginal creation stories and teaches her a way of seeing nature as something deeply spiritual. While she’s a fictional character, she represents the wisdom and reverence for the land that I came to admire during my years in Australia.
In many ways, Echoes from the River isn’t just a mystery or a coming-of-age story. It’s a love letter to a place that challenged me, changed me, and ultimately helped shape the person, and the writer, I’ve become.
How did The Outback challenge you and teach you?
When I look back, I honestly believe the confidence and resilience I developed in the Australian Outback has made all the difference. Without those experiences, I doubt my career at Johnson & Johnson would have unfolded the way it did.
I realize every chapter of my life has found its way into my fiction. My love of travel, living in different cultures, the people I’ve met, the challenges I’ve overcome, and even that little girl riding in the back seat across Mexico with a baby goat – they are all part of the storyteller I have become. Writing takes me to heaven!
What is your mission for Echoes from the River?
To bring a lost world of the Australian Outback to my readers while captivating them with Francesca’s development from a pampered girl to a self-reliant and independent young woman. And to bring the oldest continuous culture in the world to my readers as they enjoy a story of coming-of-age and family mystery.
