Bio

The son of a Navy helicopter pilot, Joseph Reid’s number of moves kept up with his age throughout most of his childhood. Upon receiving a book about sharks as a going-away present from his kindergarten classmates, he was bitten by a passion that would last the rest of his life. Through the remainder of elementary school, high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, and even in college at Duke University, he was determined to become a marine biologist.

Discovering the extremely low ratio of boat time to grant writing time in graduate school, however, he decided to cut bait and swim with a different kind of “shark.” After graduating from Notre Dame Law School, he became a patent litigator, and since then he has represented clients ranging from individual inventors to Fortune 50 companies in lawsuits valued in the millions—sometimes billions—of dollars.

He’s also spent an awful lot of time on airplanes and in airports.

These travel experiences spawn the backdrops for his novels, which he writes each morning before dawn breaks and the real world intrudes.

Read an interview with the UC Davis alumni magazine