Linda K. Murdock was raised in central Illinois. She fell in love with Denver on a business trip, hitched a trailer to her hatchback and headed West. Once in Denver she had a variety of jobs, including telemarketing, financial planning and working in the tax department of an international gold mining company. She spent her free time exploring Denver and the entire state of Colorado and hasn't stopped. Go to her lindakmurdock.com blog to read about her latest adventures and Colorado discoveries.
Her book, Almost Native, How to Pass as a Coloradan, combined her passion for history and Colorado and appeared in museums across the state in 2004. She recently launched a total rewrite of the book in 2016 as All Things Colorado in e-book format. Her focus with this new touring guide includes an invaluable list of things to do in every major tourist town in the state. Organized by location, each with its own list of local hikes, mountain biking trails, scenic drives, skiing, hot springs, brewpubs, wildlife viewing, etc., the e-book lets visitors pick and focus on their areas of interest without sorting through a lot of travel guides. You won't come home to find out other things you could have done had you known they existed at the same location.
Linda K. Murdock's most successful book to date is her best-seller, A Busy Cook's Guide to Spices. Her motivation was her husband, who was allergic to MSG and other preservatives. She found that most spice books were organized alphabetically, which does very little for everyday cooks. Her book is organized by the foods that we eat. Under each food (meat, veggie or starch) is a list of spices that go well with that food, along with recipes to get cooks thinking outside the box.
She later expanded her flavor-mania by creating A Busy Cook's Guide to Flavor-Packed Cookies and Bars, again because her husband was allergic to chocolate. She organized the book by flavor with a cookie and bar recipe for each flavor. Baking time had to be less than 35 minutes and quantities less than 36 cookies or 16 bars. Since her recipes emphasize flavor over sweetness, it seemed unnecessary to include color photos of cookies without frosting, that vary only in their shade of brown or golden. But don't let the lack of photos keep you from tasting these flavorful cookies.
Linda K. Murdock's fourth book revolves around another passion, reading. She loves mystery series and created a crossword puzzle book called Mystery Lover's Puzzle Book that was the number 3 paperback bestseller for the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association in December 2007. The book contains a synapsis of 29 different mystery series by popular authors, along with a crossword puzzle based on each series.
