Barbara Howe lives on the third rock from the sun, but her imagination travels the universe and beyond. Born in the US (North Carolina), she spent most of her adult life in New Jersey, working in the software industry, on projects ranging from low-level kernel ports to multi-million-dollar financial applications. She moved to New Zealand in 2009, gained dual citizenship, and now works as a software developer in the movie industry. She lives in Wellington, in a house overflowing with books and jigsaw puzzles, and wishes she had more time to spend universe hopping. Frustrated from back-to-back readings of several novels filled with bad writing and appalling portrayals of intelligent women, she thought she could do better, and wrote down the critical scenes from one of the movies playing in her daydreams. Her husband and daughter loved them, and demanded more. Those scenes grew into her first novel, The Locksmith, and now undammed, the ink keeps flowing.