What Lies Beneath

Cynthia Leal Massey combines her background in journalism and love of history to write award-winning historical fiction and nonfiction history. A former corporate editor, college instructor, and magazine editor, she has published hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles and several books. She was the 2008 winner of the Lone Star Award for Magazine Journalism given by the Houston Press Club for "Is UT Holding Our History Hostage?" published in Scene in SA magazine. One judge wrote: "In her exhaustive look at the unique battle over the Bexar Archives, writer Cynthia Leal Massey manages to make history come alive, filled with dark plots and do-gooders of yesteryear, and allusions to cattle rustling and murder and more." The article was also a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters O. Henry Award for Best Work of Magazine Journalism. Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry called her novel, The Caballeros of Ruby, Texas, "a vivid picture of the Rio Grande Valley as it was fifty years ago [and] a very good read." Born and raised on the south side of San Antonio, Texas, Massey has resided in Helotes, twenty miles northwest of the Alamo City, since 1994. A full-time writer, she is a past president of Women Writing the West.