Jan Coffey

Jan Coffey is a pseudonym for Nikoo and Jim McGoldrick. Nikoo, a mechanical engineer, and Jim, a professor of English with a Ph.D. in sixteenth-century British literature, are living the life of their dreams. Under the name of Jan Coffey, they write contemporary suspense thrillers for MIRA and Young Adult romantic thrillers for HarperCollins/Avon. Writing under the name May McGoldrick, they produce historical novels for Penguin Putnam, and Young Adult historical fiction for HarperCollins/Avon. Under their own names, they are the authors of the nonfiction work, Marriage of Minds: Collaborative Fiction Writing (Heinemann, June 2000).Nikoo and Jim met in 1979. Nikoo was six, and Jim was 30-something. (Just kidding...Jim was in his early twenties.) One morning, after a wild storm had ravaged the New England shoreline, Nikoo was out walking along the seawall in Stonington, Connecticut, and came upon a young man (early twenties...honest!) who was trying to salvage a battered small boat that had washed up on the rocks. Jim needed help dragging the boat up over the seawall and across the salt marsh. Anyway, by the time the two had secured the boat on higher ground, a spark had ignited between them. It was instant electricity...and Jim's been chasing Nikoo ever since.Now, 25 years later, they live in Litchfield County, CT, with their two sons and their golden retriever, Max. They love writing, they love Harlequin/MIRA, and they love the friends (both readers and writers) they've made through their writing.