Washington Post staff writer Dan Morse set off to be an engineer. But the tough classes at Vanderbilt, specifically Differential Equations, convinced him to try something else. Like sports-writing, for the college newspaper. It proved a better fit, and soon enough, Morse tried out for the football team so he could write a year’s worth of columns chronicling his exploits as skinny but slow wide receiver. After graduation, Morse combined his engineering degree with his interest in writing and, as if it had been planned all along, took a position at Civil Engineering magazine in New York. Who can forget his prescient 1989 piece on upcoming waste-water treatment disposal regulations: “Sludge in the Nineties.”

Wanting to know how other things worked – crime, politics, business – and knowing how much he needed to learn about the basics of journalism, Morse sought a reporting position at more than 50 newspapers. Exactly one of them offered him a job, The Alabama Journal, an afternoon daily in Montgomery, Ala., where Morse settled in as a cops reporter. He moved on to that city’s morning paper, The Advertiser, covering state politics and becoming a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series of stories on the Southern Poverty Law Center. From there, he moved to The Baltimore Sun, The Wall Street Journal, and, in 2005, The Washington Post. (Some of his favorite stories, and the most interesting people he has met, can be found on a story archive site. All of his current stories can be found on this Washington Post page.)

On a Saturday morning, March 12, 2011, Morse learned that a possible murder victim had been found inside a high-end yoga store in downtown, Bethesda. He drove to the store, covered the story for the Post for the next year, and, in 2012, signed a contract with Berkley Books to write an account of the case. The more he learned, the more the story expanded from one about a gruesome crime one about the absorbing and suddenly intertwined lives of a remarkable cast of characters. The Yoga Store Murder, set to be released on Nov. 5, 2013, is his first book.

Morse grew up with four siblings in Urbana, Ill., where his parents still live. He is married to Dana Hedgpeth, a fellow Post reporter. They have a young daughter named C.C.