Deputy Chief Joseph K. Loughlin is a 24-year veteran of the Portland (Maine) Police Department. During that time he has served as a patrol officer, a detective in the Crimes against persons and drug enforcement units, a sergeant in the patrol division and the Maine Drug Enforcement Unit, a Lieutenant in the Patrol Division and the Criminal Investigation Division and as Head of the CID from 1998 until 2002 when he became Captain of the Patrol Division. In January, 2006, he was named Deputy Chief. He is a graduate of the FBI Academy Command Training Program and the Babson College Command Training Institute. Captain Loughlin's undergraduate degree is from St. Joseph'e College in Standish, Maine and he holds a MS in Adult Education/HR from the University of Southern Maine. He has authored numerous articles about the police officer's perspective for local papers.

Attorney Kate Flora is a graduate of Tufts University and Northeastern University School of Law. A former assistant attorney general for the state of Maine and the author of seven mystery novels, six in the Thea Kozak series and a stand-alone suspense novel. She has taught writing for Grub Street, the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, at the Cape Cod Writer's Conference, and for the Brown University Learning Community. She is a past international president of the mystery writer's organization, Sisters in Crime. She has written many articles for the Sisters in Crime national newsletter, InSinC, and for the New England regional newsletter, SHEDUNNIT, as well an article for the Northeastern School of Law alumni magazine. Her profile of author Elinor Lipman appeared in The Larcom Review and her profile of Maine's first poet laureate, Kate Barnes, in The Wolf Moon Press. With two other writers, she has formed Level Best Books, a publishing cooperative which has published three anthologies of crime stories by New England writers. She is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Vermont College.