Lynne Stonier-Newman was born in Quesnel in 1941, where her father Gordon Nicol was the first BC Provincial Police highway patrolman in the Quesnel district from 1939 to 1941. He later served as mayor of Kamloops from 1970 to 1972. She lives north of Kamloops, at Little Heffley Lake, where she has worked as a technical writer, marketing consultant and history buff whose articles, fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of periodicals.

She is the author of Policing a Pioneer Province: The BC Provincial Police 1858-1950 (Harbour, 1991) and a follow-up study of BCPP member Frederick Hussey, The Lawman (Heritage, 2006), in the form of a novel. She describes her subject as a "superintendent for two decades in an era when the non-Native population of British Columbia ballooned from less than 50,000 to more than 300,000, and people switched from using horses and carriages to automobiles."

In a similar vein to her preceding BC historical novel The Lawman, Lynne Stonier-Newman has provided the first biography of the man who served as gold commissioner of BC during the height of the Fraser River Gold Rush. Peter O'Reilly: The Rise of a Reluctant Immigrant (Touchwood $19.95) also outlines the Irishman's multi-faceted career as a county court judge, assistant land commissioner and federally appointed BC Indian Reserve Lands commissioner from 1880 to 1898. Nicknamed The Judge by his friends who included Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie and Edward Dewdney, O'Reilly lived at Point Ellice House in Victoria.

She has also published an illustrated poetry chapbook and an audio book entitled The Whys of a Women, with Jackie Stonier, a collection of 65 first-person stories that highlight how mature Canadian women perceive themselves. It was derived from a five-page questionnaire that was circulated to 200 English-speaking Canadian women in 1999. Her poetry chapbook is Canadian-Eh?

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Peter O'Reilly: The Rise of a Reluctant Immigrant

BOOKS

Policing a Pioneer Province: The BC Provincial Police 1858-1950 (Harbour, 1991)

The Lawman: Adventures of a Frontier Diplomat (Heritage, 2006)

Peter O'Reilly: The Rise of a Reluctant Immigrant (Touchwood, 2010) 978-1-926741-04-8

[BCBW 2010] "Law" "Fiction" "Women"