CAPE NATIVE QUITS VETERINARY MEDICINE TO BECOME WRITER

When people meet Edie Swihart and find out she was a veterinarian and quit, they often are incredulous.

"They say, Oh no, I always wanted to be a veterinarian," she says.

Swihart always wanted to be a veterinarian, too, but now that the Southeast Missouri native is a mystery writer her other childhood dream has come true.

Her first book, "Never Buried," has just been published by Dutton/Signet. It is a Leigh Koslow Mystery, the first of a series.

Swihart, who is married and now lives in Pittsburgh, Pa., was born in Cape Girardeau. Her mother, Patricia Illers Vincent, grew up in Jackson, and her father, Jackson D. Vincent, was a professor of education at Southeast Missouri State University until the family moved to Poplar Bluff in 1966.

Her parents eventually settled in Mayfield, Ky.

Swihart went to veterinary school and began practicing small-animal medicine in the Pittsburgh borough of Avalon. But she found herself ill-suited to the profession.

"I didn't like the clinical aspects so much," she said. "I'm not real good with my hands."

Being a veterinarian is "much more of an art than a science," she says.

So Swihart switched to her second dream. In childhood, she had written stories about new species of animals and mythical royal families. In the eighth grade, she wrote a paper titled "Diary of a Psycho."

Her teacher proposed she write from her own experience. "But Mrs. McNeilly," she said, "that would be boring."

So Swihart, who has two young children, began writing for medical journals and eventually tried a mystery, the kind of book she herself likes to read.

"I like creating characters," she says. "When someone else reads the book it brings the characters to life."

She spent a year writing, found an agent on the Internet within two months and saw the book sold in three months. She signed a contract for three books.

The main character of the first book, Leigh Koslow, is an advertising copy writer, not a veterinarian. "Veterinarians don't have time to go around solving mysteries," Swihart says.

But Koslow's father is a vet.

"Never Buried" is set in Avalon, where Koslow moves into a Victorian house with a history. Two tragic deaths occurred there in 1949, but "what used to be a curious local mystery suddenly begins impinging on the present," she says.

The book has no explicit violence, language or sex and is suitable for teen readers up, says Swihart. It is dedicated to her best friend, Teresa Stewart, who still lives in Poplar Bluff.

The protagonist is named Koslow because Pittsburgh has so many Eastern European names. Swihart wanted to use Illers, her mother's maiden name, for a pen name, but the font the publisher wanted to use made the I and the L's indistinguishable. She chose Edie Claire instead.

She will be signing copies of her book at 3 p.m. March 27 at the Mayfield Public Library.

Quitting veterinary medicine was made easier by finding her calling, Swihart said. "It was hard to accept the fact that I probably went in the wrong direction. But as soon as I started writing I fell in love with it."