Lea O’Harra is the pen-name I have adopted for my fiction. It incorporates my middle name and my mother’s maiden name.

Originally Wendy Jones, since my marriage, Wendy Jones Nakanishi, I was born in America in 1954 and raised in a tiny town in the northwest corner of Indiana (Rolling Prairie — population 500). Once I reached adulthood, I longed for travel and adventure. I have now lived outside the States most of my life: spending half a year in Holland, a year in Paris, and nine years in Britain — five in Lancaster and four in Edinburgh, where I earned a doctorate in 18th-century English literature for a thesis on the contemporary context of the correspondence published by the famous poet Alexander Pope.

I have also spent thirty-six years in Japan, going there originally in the spring of 1984 to take up a position at a small private university on the island of Shikoku. Retiring in the spring of 2020, I moved to the UK to spend some of my retirement in an English-speaking country. I alternate my time between my home in Lancaster and my home in Takamatsu. My husband is a Japanese farmer, and we have three sons. I have published numerous academic articles and critical monographs and book reviews as well as writing creative non-fiction about my life in Japan.

The Inspector Inoue mystery series marked my first venture into crime fiction. I have published three Inspector Inoue mysteries and now a stand-alone mystery set in small-town America.