Sharron Martin first became interested in writing at the age of thirteen. She even began her first book at that time. However, several things began to get in the way—things like puberty, school, boys. As she aged, these things became college, marriage, teaching, life. She was middle-aged before she decided, with the support of her husband, to quit teaching to write full time.

Sharron was born and raised in southern Alabama. Her father was in textiles and her mother a stay-at-home mom. When Sharron was only eight years old, her mother died of cancer. Three years later her father remarried, this time to an elementary school teacher. After high school, Sharron left home to attend Alabama College (now Montevallo University) a small school in central Alabama. Because she always loved music and had taken many years of piano lessons and participated in chorus and band in high school, she decided to major in music.

While working on her degree, she met the young man who was destined to become her husband, and who continues to be her best friend. A year after their wedding she received a Bachelor of Music Education: a major in piano and a minor in voice.

Upon graduating from college, Sharron taught elementary school because music jobs in public education were hard to come by. When her husband finished his undergraduate degree at Birmingham Southern, she followed him to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he attended graduate school and she again found herself in an elementary classroom.

When her husband was offered a teaching position at the Medical College of Georgia, she once again pulled up stakes and followed him—this time to Augusta, Georgia. Finally, she was offered a job teaching public school music. She was given two elementary schools twenty miles apart, a total of about a thousand students, and no classroom in either school. She had
to lug her equipment from classroom to classroom every thirty minutes. Sharron was relieved to return to a regular elementary school classroom for the following year.

After many years of trying to write while teaching full time, Ms. Martin realized what she really wanted to do was write full time. After she and her husband crunched the numbers, sold the sail boat, and tightened the belt, she handed in her resignation to the school board and began her new career. When she told her fellow teachers what she was planning to do,
one gentle lady innocently asked her if she wrote from experience. Considering she was writing murder mysteries, she just smiled knowingly.

Shortly into her new career, Sharron, like her mother before her, was diagnosed with cancer. Unlike her mother, however, hers was caught early and she has been cancer free for many years.

Sharron fell in love with the mystery genre back when she was reading Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Through the years this love has not diminished. Occasionally she will wander off the coarse, but she always comes back to her mysteries.

Sharron Martin makes her home in Augusta, Georgia, along with her husband, Rick, and their cat, Moose.

Murder Sings Out is the first of a series featuring Elizabeth Poindexter.