Brooke Terpening
Award Winning Author
Sawgrass Grave
Brie Broussard #1
She has a temper, a sailboat, and a murder case she probably shouldn't have taken.
Brie Broussard was a rising prosecutor—until one case got an innocent kid killed and took everything else with it: her marriage, her career, her faith in the system. Now she's a mitigation investigator scraping by on insurance fraud cases, living on a sailboat she can barely afford, and skating roller derby on the weekends because the bruises are easier than the grief.
Her newest client is Niko Moreno, owner of Miami's hottest nightclub, accused of decapitating his manager and leaving her body in the Everglades for the alligators. He swears he's innocent—and won't talk about his past, his enemies, or the cocaine someone planted in his car.
Brie's investigation pulls her through back-alley motels, the Miami underworld, and a dead woman's secrets that hit too close to home. Everyone connected to Niko has something to hide—his disbarred business manager, the cartel circling him like vultures, even his conveniently pro bono attorney. And the more Brie learns about the victim, the more this case starts to echo the one that broke her.
Brie is closing in on the killer. The killer's already digging her sawgrass grave.
Perfect for fans of Tami Hoag and Lisa Gardner, Sawgrass Grave is a gritty Miami crime series debut with a heroine who's too stubborn to stop and too sharp to ignore.
"Innocence is a moral concept. In my world, there's only guilty and not guilty."
- Brie Broussard
WORSE THAN DEATH was a finalist in the 2022 Killer Nashville Claymore Award competition for Best Investigator.
The 2021 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Gold Rush Literary Awards named WORSE THAN DEATH as the winner in the Mystery/Thriller category.
WORSE THAN DEATH won first place in the Writer’s League of Texas manuscript contest Mystery category and was a finalist in the Thriller/Action-Adventure category.
WORSE THAN DEATH won first place the Pacific Northwest Writers Association 2021 Mystery/Thriller category.
Life is about re-invention and unexpected connections.
After a successful career as a software engineer, Brooke went to law school to become a patent attorney. There she rediscovered her love of research and writing. While studying for the USPTO bar exam, her career took a sharp detour. She became immersed in defending death penalty cases.
The next years took Brooke inside the workings of Florida’s criminal justice system. The cases were sometimes frightening and always heart-breaking. The attorneys and mitigation specialists who did the thankless job of defending accused killers were among the most dedicated professionals she’d ever met. They believed justice wasn’t only for the wealthy and privileged and worked to ensure that no corners were cut.
Writing legal briefs and motions isn’t the same as writing fiction (no matter what opposing counsel says). To learn the craft, Brooke applied and was accepted into Denver’s Lighthouse Writer’s Book Project. There she drafted her first novel. She is active in Colorado Sisters-in-Crime and on the board for the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America.
Today Brooke lives outside Boulder with her husband and therapy dogs. When she's not enjoying the mountains or writing, her therapy dogs provide comfort and emotional support to patients, police, and trauma survivors.
Of course, Brooke's always on the hunt for the next challenge and adventure.