J. Sydney Jones (b. 1948) is an American author of fiction and
nonfiction. Born in the United States, he studied abroad in Vienna
in 1968 and later returned to Austria to live there for nearly two
decades. In the late 1970s he began writing travel books, many of
which concern central Europe, and published his first thriller,
Time of the Wolf, in 1990. In 2009 Jones published The
Empty Mirror, a mystery set in late-nineteenth-century Vienna
that would become the first book in his Viennese Mystery series, of
which the most recent installment is The Keeper of Hands
(2013). Jones lives with his wife and son in
California.