Aileen Baron has a Ph.D. in archaeology and taught for twenty years in the Department of Anthropology at California State University, Fullerton. Her many years of archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East, include a year at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem as an NEH scholar, and director of the overseas campus of California State Universities at the Hebrew University. Her residence in Switzerland, the hub of the antiquities trade, and her experience in museums has given her an insight into the underside of the trade in ancient art, the focus of her latest mystery, The Gold Of Thrace.
Her first novel, A Fly Has A Hundred Eyes, about the murder of a British archaeologist in 1938 in British mandated Palestine, won first place in the mystery category at both the Pikes Peak Writers conference and the SouthWest Writers Conference. The second novel in the Lily Sampson series, The Torch Of Tangier, takes place in Morocco during WW II, when Lily is recruited into the OSS to work on the preparations for the Allied invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch