Liz Lazarus

Liz grew up in Valdosta, GA, known for its high school football and the last watering hole on highway I-75 before entering Florida. She was editor of her high school newspaper and salutatorian of her class. Lazarus followed in her father’s footsteps, graduating from Georgia Tech with an engineering degree and went on to a successful career at General Electric.

The events that inspired her to write Free of Malice happened her senior year of college. Liz was living off campus in an area called Home Park when she was jarred awake by the sound of her bedroom door crashing open. She admits that she surprised even herself at her ability to fight back and this would-be-rapist eventually fled. Though her voice was hoarse from screaming and her fingers bloody from his bites, she physically survived the attack. Emotionally, however, her sense of security was shaken. As a means to heal, she began writing about that night and the changes to her life.

At one point, she had mentioned to her brother-in-law that if she had owned a gun, she would have shot the guy when he was leaving. He countered that her actions might not have been deemed self-defense which got Liz thinking about the criminal justice system. Though Free of Malice is a hypothetical legal story, written in conjunction with several criminal defense attorneys, the attack on the main character was drawn from Liz’s real life experience. In addition, the unique therapy sessions using EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) techniques that the main character undergoes were written in collaboration with an EMDR trained therapist.

Interestingly, Liz never intended to write a fiction novel—she had other ambitions on her bucket list—a career at GE, living in Paris and learning to speak French, receiving her executive MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, getting her pilot’s license and co-producing a music CD with her best friend, Thomas Barnette. But, as she describes it, “the book wouldn’t leave me alone—it kept nudging me to write it to the point that I could no longer ignore the calling. And now that it’s done, I look back and realize what a rewarding journey it has been.”