BIOGRAPHY J R Lankford Author, The Jesus Thief    J R Lankford's suspense novel, The Jesus Thief, is rich with international settings and diverse characters for good reason. Fascination with cultures and a yen for travel are in her blood. An electrical engineer, Lankford was asked to fill the U.S. Secretariat of a Technical Committee in the organization responsible for international standards on electrical products--the first woman appointed to such a position by any country. She traveled the world for 12 years in this demanding job.    Then in 1993, with her husband's encouragement and support, she resigned to become a novelist.    "It was scary leaving that kind of career to start all over again and be a writer," she says. "Some of my friends and many of my colleagues thought I was crazy. Who leaves a job where you go to work in London and Paris?"    But books were her first love.    "They were always everywhere when I was growing up: on tables, on shelves, in my great grandmother's hands as she read to us from her rocking chair.    "The rooms I remember in detail from my principal childhood home are the library with its floor-to-ceiling shelving filled with books and my parents' bedroom. In an alcove was a glass-fronted bookshelf kept locked. One day when I was eleven I found the key in the lock, turned it, and like a thief stole Cheri, a novel by Colette. Oh, to be able to write like that! My parents feared I was too young for Colette, but they allowed me to read everything she wrote. I yearned to be like her: traveling the world in the company of friends and writing books, books, books.    "On my first trip to Paris, I took a train to the village where Colette was born, Saint Sauveur en Puisaye. I imagined her telling me, 'Don't moon over me. I'm dead. It's your turn now.'    For The Jesus Thief, a documentary about the Shroud of Turin, on which a scientist claimed to have found Type AB male blood, provided inspiration.    "I thought, 'what would happen if a devout man decided he could clone Jesus of Nazareth?' The idea consumed me. I'd always been fascinated by religions, their differences and commonalities.    "In The Jesus Thief I explore the damage we do to ourselves and others because of religious dogma when at the heart of every religion is the concept that God is love. Given our troubling times, that message felt all the more important. It was also great fun to explore the scientific and medical aspects of the novel, the ethics of human cloning, and to research the particulars of my characters' interests and backgrounds. I studied cloning technology, in-vitro fertilization, the history of the Jews in Italy, the decline of the U.S. Merchant Marine, the growth of AIDS in Africa and learned who makes hats for the British Queen."    Which brings us to Lankford's family.    A-turn-of-the-century article about her paternal grandfather (a lawyer) in the Nashville Colored Directory says, "He has traveled very extensively in this country and abroad, having visited London, England during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee." Other family members had a conspicuous wanderlust as well.    "I'm not into royalty, so I figure my grandfather must have been whispering in my ear about Victoria's Diamond Jubilee while I was asleep, and what emerged in The Jesus Thief was Felix's maid, Maggie--a plain, poor woman yearning for a monarch's hat."    Lankford has founded two popular and innovative workshops for fiction authors online: WriteLab and NovelDoc. "I learned that appreciating good writing and producing it are very different," she says. She closed WriteLab in 1998, but has compiled its materials into a book of the same name for which there is already a waiting list. Great Reads Books will publish it in the Fall of 2003. However it was within the clinics of NovelDoc, her advanced workshop for novelists, that Lankford perfected The Jesus Thief.    When she isn't writing, she enjoys matching wits with her inventor/engineer-husband, who along with a sister is her first reader. And Lankford still loves to travel. The most vivid scenes in The Jesus Thief occur in locations she photographed or videotaped during trips to Italy and New York.