Jennifer Dornbush "Hole in the Woods"

Jennifer Dornbush is a screenwriter, author, international speaker and forensic specialist. As she says, “I grew up around death.”

The television or movie screen is the closest most people will ever come to witnessing the forensic world. But Jennifer was raised in it. As the daughter of a small town medical examiner whose office was in their home. There were body parts in the fridge. She investigated her first fatality, an airplane crash, when she was 8 years old. Picking up pieces of skull with her father who simply saw it as an anatomy lesson. The first of many coroner lessons she experienced over two decades.

After exploring journalism and high school teaching, Jennifer turned seriously to screenwriting where she began to connect her coroner world to her writing. She sought out a degree at the Forensic Science Academy in Los Angeles to gain more forensic training and earned a unique kinship with LA’s top CSIs, fingerprint specialists, DNA scientists and detectives.

To share her love of forensics with the writing world, she authored the top selling non-fiction authoritative book, Forensic Speak, used by not only by show-runners and writers, but also crime investigators and law enforcement.

She created an Amazon top-selling mystery novel series, The Coroner’s Daughter. The first book in the series, The Coroner, released in 2018. The second in the series, Secret Remains, released January 2020. She is developing the series for TV.

She wrote the theatrically released film and novel, God Bless the Broken Road (2018). She has developed a TV crime drama series with Echo Lake and Hoplite Entertainment. Also she adapted a popular YA novel to script and sold a children’s show.

As a forensic consultant, she is frequently asked to consult with TV writers on shows such as: Bull, Conviction, Hawaii Five-O, Leverage, Suits and Rectify. She teaches screenwriting and mentors aspiring writers.

Jennifer is a member of the Writers’ Guild of America, Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America and FBI Citizen’s Academy Alumni.

And she has a great sense of gallows humor.
July 1989, in a sleepy Michigan town, high school grad, Nina Laramie, heads out with her friends and is never seen alive again. Months later, her skeleton is found near a remote party spot in the forest.

The ME determines Nina has been brutally raped and bludgeoned to death. Fear and anger ripple through this tight knit community when the case goes cold.

Thirty years later, Riley St. James, a Detroit PD assigned to Nina’s case, is determined to get her first big cold case win despite having a similar past to the victim. Relying on her investigative prowess and gut instinct, Riley tracks down a witness, who saw Nina Laramie’s murder. But as the truth comes to light, Riley must face the killers who want their secret to stay in the Hole in the Woods.

Based on the 1989 true-life murder case of Shannon Siders for Newaygo County, Michigan. After the case went dormant, a Michigan cold case team formed in 2011and uncovered new evidence that enabled them to arrest, try, and convict the killers, who were sent to prison for Shannon’s murder in 2015