William Dean is an award-winning writer and editor who had a lengthy career as an investigative journalist before becoming a novelist. He is the author of four suspense novels: The Have-Nots, Militia Men, Dangerous Freedom and The Ghosts We Know.

Dean feels a need to be close to water, a desire likely rooted in his bicoastal upbringing that he later echoed in his career.

His family left Brooklyn when he was in kindergarten, ending up in the San Francisco area, where his father taught science and his mother worked as a nurse.

Dean graduated from San Francisco State University with a journalism degree and went on to blaze a trail at a half-dozen newspapers, including the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Newsday on Long Island. Many of the in-depth investigations he led either as a reporter or editor resulted in major reforms. One project prompted a governor to fire his corrupt top law enforcement official. Another led a state’s high court to boost minimum standards for lawyers representing Death Row inmates.

After leaving Newsday as a senior editor in 2018, Dean turned to his dream of writing novels inspired by the many interesting characters he’d encountered.

The inspiration behind Dangerous Freedom was a series of interviews behind prison walls that Dean had with a jailhouse lawyer in Boise, Idaho. The Ghosts We Know was influenced by the close friendship Dean’s Parkinson’s-stricken father forged with his German caregiver, a fellow World War II veteran.

Dean lives in Astoria, Oregon, where he also writes a blog and a monthly newspaper column about craft beer.