Kathy Sechrist is the award-winning author of two memoirs, Success Is the Best Revenge and Sara’s Redemption: A Journey of Courage, Resilience, and Hope, about surviving what she describes as the parts of her life that don’t get talked about at dinner parties. Both books have found readers well beyond what a first-time memoirist might reasonably expect, and Kathy has spent the years since publication in conversation with women who have quietly shared their own stories with her, most of which cannot be told publicly.

In another life, Kathy was a civilian instructor for the military. She spent ten weeks aboard an aircraft carrier at a time when women were not yet stationed on Navy ships; a formative experience that put her in rooms most women of her generation never entered. She went on to spend years as an organizational change management consultant, work that taught her how groups form and hold themselves together, and how much of what a room knows never gets said out loud.

Those two experiences, and the conversations that followed her memoirs, became the reason for her first mystery novel, Bodies Under the Bluebonnets, Book One of the China Grove Mysteries. Book Two, The Watcher, will be released in Winter 2026.

Kathy lives in the Texas Hill Country outside San Antonio, where the town of China Grove is based on a real place and the real people she has written into the series. She publishes under her own imprint, Whidbey Island Publishing. Her weekly Substack about the world of the China Grove Mysteries can be found at kathysechrist.substack.com(opens in new tab).

Affiliations: Author’s Guild, Women’s Fiction Writers Association, Independent Book Publishing Association, Alliance of Independent Writers, Texas Writers’ League