About Mike

At the age of seven, Mike (J.M. Hayes) moved from Hutchinson, Kansas to the family farm, ten miles south. With playmates no longer handy, books and authors became Mike's best friends. When he wasn't reading, he was acting out plots with imaginary friends in fields and outbuildings. That's part of why he started writing, to repay the gifts authors supplied that helped him fill many lonely hours.

Mike hopes his Arizona WWII historical novel, The Grey Pilgrim, and his fictional Benteen County, Kansas, Mad Dog & Englishman series, with its frantic Murphy's-Law-kind-of-day mysteries, have done the same for others. His latest, The Spirit and the Skull, combines his studies in archaeology at Wichita State and Arizona, a field season spent on the fabled tundra of north Alaska, and his concerns that a short-term greed-based global economy won't leave a suitable habitat for future generations. Mother Nature will have her revenge.

Mike's passions include reading, swimming, computer gaming, and annoying politicians as a neighborhood activist. He lives in Tucson with his wife Barbara in a house filled with books and German Shepherds.