Elizabeth Butler has published her first three novels, THE COLONEL'S WIDOW, TRAILBOSS and J.D's Rustler. The western romances take place in Arizona just after the Civil War and in Wyoming during the cattle wars, and in Montana during present day. Butler grew up in Arcola, Illinois. She's lived in Indiana, Missouri and Arizona where she came to love the west. While living in Arizona she and her family were perpetual travelers and virtually covered the whole state during their ten-year residency. She and her husband of 36 years returned to Arcola sixteen years ago. She has been writing for more than twenty years and is a secretary at the University of Illinois currently working in the French Department. She is the mother of a grown daughter and has a four-year old granddaughter and a six-month old grandson living in Missouri. She loves to travel and has made frequent trips to Montana and Wyoming. In the fall of 1998, she spent a week on a real working ranch herding cattle in Montana to help with her research on her most recent novel, J.D.'s Rustler. Her articles have been published in magazines such as Boys' Life, Family MotorCoaching, Midwest Outdoors, Grit, Persimmon Hill, the Magazine of the Cowboy Hall of Fame Museum in Oklahoma City and other periodicals as well as religious magazines. In recent years, her focus has been on novels. Most take place in the west, but several, yet to be published, are placed, at least in part, in Illinois. Her next book will be MASTER OF THE NIGHT, a story about the underground railroad in Illinois is scheduled for release in late Spring 2002. It is the first in a trilogy with the next, CALICO QUEEN, proposed to be released in Spring 2003 followed by the final book in the series LIBBY.