Leslie Glass was raised in New York City. She studied music at Mannes College and received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College where she studied under Joseph Campbell and Grace Paley.

An active philanthropist, Glass has been involved with a variety of non-profit organizations. She has served as the president of Plays for Living, as the vice president of the Asolo Repertory Theatre, as a public member of the Middle States Commission of Higher Education, and as a board member of the Mystery Writers of America and the Sarasota Reading Festival.

Additionally, in 1990 she established the Leslie Glass Foundation, which provides fellowships at NYU, the CUNY Graduate Center, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the National Center for Victims of Crime, the New York City Police Foundation, and the Ringling College of Art and Design.

Glass is the author of fifteen novels, nine of which compose a New York Times Bestselling series. This sequence of novels center around an NYPD detective, April Woo. The first title in the series, Burning Time, was published in 1993 by Bantam Books, a Random House imprint.

Glass began her career in advertising, publishing, and at New York magazine, where she wrote the "Intelligencer" column. Her writing has been featured in Redbook and Cosmopolitan, and translated in six foreign languages. She also worked as a scriptwriter for the soap opera Guiding Light.

Her novel Over His Dead Body was produced for the stage by Robert Brustein under the name Strokes. This work, as well as the novels Getting Away With It, Modern Love, and the entirety of the April Woo series have been optioned for feature films.

Rehab Productions, a film company founded by Glass, is scheduled to release the feature film Rehab is for Quitters in 2011.

Novels

April Woo Series

• Burning Time (1993), Bantam Books
• Hanging Time (1995), Bantam Books
• Loving Time (1996), Bantam Books
• Judging Time (1998), Signet Books
• Stealing Time (1999), Signet Books
• Tracking Time (2000), Signet Books
• The Silent Bride (2002), Onyx
• A Killing Gift (2003), Onyx
• A Clean Kill (2005), Onyx

Other Works

• Getting Away With It (1976), Doubleday Books
• Modern Love (1983), St. Martin's Press
• To Do No Harm (1992) Doubleday Books
• Natural Suspect: A Collaborative Novel (2001), devised by William Bernhardt, Ballantine Books
• Over His Dead Body: A Novel of Sweet Revenge (2003), Ballantine Books
• For Love and Money: A Novel of Stocks and Robbers (2004), Ballantine Books
• Sleeper (2010)

Short Stories

• High Stakes: Eight stories of Gambling and Crime (2003), Robert J. Randisi (Editor), Signet Books
• The Blue Religion: New Stories about Cops, Criminals, and the Chase (2008), Michael Connelly (Editor), Little, Brown and Company

Plays

• Strokes (1984)
• The Survivors (1989)
• On The Edge (1991)