Mitch Luckett grew up on a red-clay and limestone-rock farm in Missouri where he developed a lifelong affinity for animals, both domestic and wild. He discovered, after getting off his school bus one day, a dazed common loon that had missed the muddy Mississippi and crashed on a water-slickened asphalt road. He took the hungry bird home, nursed it back to health, and released it on the big river. His sisters, until now, have had no idea what happened to their gold fish. That encounter became the inspiration for this contemporary fantasy/rural Northwest mystery, To Kill a Common Loon. Two more novels in the series have yet to take wing: The Man in the Loon, and "The Cow That Jumped over the Loon.
Mitch served in the Navy then returned home to earn a BA in English Literature at Truman University. He was Nature Sanctuaries Director for the Portland Audubon Society in Oregon for 17 years, and he honed his skills as a storyteller by writing a monthly column for their newsletter, The Warbler. He now lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Brinnon, Washington, where he writes, picks banjo, sings to the birds, and tells tall tales to his Westie, Mim.