Joan Francis is a licensed private investigator and owner of Francis Pacific Investigations. She has also worked as a librarian and a newspaper reporter and editor and says each of these jobs is just a different method for the same task: providing information.

She spent her childhood in small mining towns and camps in the western United States and in South America with her two sisters, mother, and mining engineer father. Moving from place to place as her father opened up new mine sites, she attended fifteen schools before graduating with a BA in history from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Married with three grown children, she and her husband now live in a secluded valley of the Tehachapi Mountains, where she writes and makes occasional expeditions to "town" when her PI clients need her services.