Thomas Reid Pearson is an American novelist born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He is the author of seventeen novels and four works of non-fiction under his own name, including A Short History of a Small Place, Cry Me A River, Jerusalem Gap, and Seaworthy, and has written three additional novels -- Ranchero, Beluga, and Nowhere Nice -- under the pseudonym Rick Gavin. Pearson has also ghostwritten several other books, both fiction and nonfiction, and has written or co-written various feature film and TV scripts.