Michael Putegnat grew up on the border in far south Texas in the 1950's and 60's and returned there after college to continue a family tradition in business, starting a computer enterprise. But his election to a local governing board in the 1980's was a perspective jarring event and led him deep into a conflict pitting radical change against old traditions and power. In a quest to understand how people choose to govern themselves, he studied public policy and administration at the Kennedy School, Harvard University in 1993 and 94, where he focused on Decision Theory and Negotiations. Following, he launched a consultancy for business, government, higher education and non-profits confronting structural change, eventually joining The University of Texas System Administration full time.

While it had been a life-long ambition, he wrote his first novel, LAGUNA, in 2005, and did not begin to write full time until 2016. He is interested in how and why people organize themselves as they do and why so many efforts fail. He has chosen the novel as his preferred medium for his exploration of these themes, partly because it provides greater subtlety and texture to the complexity humans bring to everything they do, and partly because he has long been a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Patrick O'Brien, Charles Dickens, and Agatha Christie. He particularly enjoys writing about ordinary people who do extraordinary things.