About David

David Freed is an instrument-rated pilot, produced Hollywood screenwriter, and former staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, where he covered the military, served as the Times’ lead police reporter, and reported from the Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq during the first Gulf War. Among his many other awards, he was an individual finalist for the Pulitzer Prize’s Gold Medal for Public Service, the highest honor in American journalism, for his multi-part expose of ineptitudes within the Los Angeles County criminal justice system, and shared the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Spot News Reporting of the Rodney King riots. After leaving the Times, David was hired by the Los Angeles bureau of CBS News as an investigator and associate field producer covering the OJ Simpson case. Later, he worked with the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Army’s Battle Command Battle Lab at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. All of those experiences helped shape his aviation-infused Cordell Logan murder mystery novels, beginning with Flat Spin.

David’s also written frequently for national magazines, including Air & Space Smithsonian, where he was a contributing editor, and the Atlantic, where his story, “The Wrong Man,” about an Army medical researcher falsely accused of mass murder, was shortlisted as Best Feature Story of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors. A former special assistant professor of journalism at his alma mater, Colorado State University, David holds a master’s degree from Harvard University and currently teaches creative writing at Harvard Extension School.