Lisa Lieberman

Lisa Lieberman is the author of the Cara Walden series of historical mysteries featuring blacklisted Hollywood people in exotic European locales. All the Wrong Places and Burning Cold are available from Passport Press in print and e-book.

Trained as a modern European cultural and intellectual historian, Lieberman abandoned a perfectly respectable academic career for the life of a vicarious adventurer through dangerous times and places. She has written extensively on postwar Europe. Leaving You: The Cultural Meaning of Suicide, her first book, addresses the suicides of notable Holocaust survivors including Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim, and Jean Améry. Her translations of Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay, “Paris Under the Occupation,” and Simone de Beauvoir’s essay, “An Eye for an Eye,” are available on Now and Then Reader. “Dirty War,” an account of the French campaign against terrorism in Algeria, was released as a Kindle Single. Her most recent essay on the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution, “Stalin’s Boots,” became the inspiration for the next Cara Walden mystery. This one is set in Budapest just as the Soviet tanks roll back in, evoking Carol Reed’s classic film of intrigue and betrayal, The Third Man.

Lieberman taught history for many years at Dickinson College and directed their Center in Bologna, Italy. She has held visiting fellowships at Ohio State and the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England and was the recipient of a Bourse Chateaubriand for research in Paris. She now directs a nonprofit foundation dedicated to redressing racial and economic inequity in public elementary and secondary schools. In her spare time, Lieberman lectures on postwar efforts to come to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust in film and literature. She has published essays, translations, and short stories in Gettysburg Review, Raritan, Michigan Quarterly, Mystery Scene and elsewhere and contributed a monthly column on film at 3 Quarks Daily. Media experience includes interviews on National Public Radio’s “To The Best of Our Knowledge” and Australian National Radio’s “All in the Mind,” and a panel discussion on KQED’s public affairs call-in program, “Forum.” She is a member of Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America.