Joe McKinney is a homicide detective for the San Antonio Police Department. When he’s not solving murders, he spends his time writing horror, science fiction, and mystery stories. His first novel was Dead City (Kensington Press, 2006), an apocalyptic tale of zombies and survival horror. He is also the author of Quarantined (LBF Books, 2009), a science fiction disaster story based on his training and experience as a disaster mitigation expert with the San Antonio Police Department, and a collection of three horror and science fiction novellas entitled Peacekeepers (Magus Press, 2009).
Joe has a Master’s Degree in English Literature from The University of Texas at San Antonio. These days, when he’s not reading professional criminal justice journals, he reads as much pulp fiction as he can. Some of his favorites from the good old days of the pulps include Manly Wade Wellman, Elmer Kelton, Richard Matheson, Cornell Woolrich, William Tenn, Cordwainer Smith, and Raymond Chandler. Some of his current favorites include Jeff Vandermeer, Dan Simmons, Connie Willis, T.E.D. Klein, John Scalzi, Joe Hill, Stephen King, Lee Thomas, Robert McCammon, and Ted Chiang.
Before joining the Homicide Division as a detective, Joe worked on the San Antonio Police Department’s Critical Incident Management Team, where he received training in dealing with a variety of natural and manmade disasters, such as floods, fires, and train wrecks, and that training figures prominently in his fiction.
Many of his stories deal with the collapse of society’s structure, the routine that makes our world seem, for all its faults, more or less normal, as seen from the eyes of characters who have had the ground pulled out from beneath their feet. He currently lives and works in San Antonio with his wife, two daughters, and two cats.
