Born in New Jersey to Irish parents, Grace lived and worked in New York City until 2001.  In September 2001, she and her late husband Miguel Peraza, a figurative painter, travelled to Italy with their two cats, Rachel and LoMein.  In 2002, while still in Italy, she began her first work of fiction, The Last Enemy, a police procedural set in Umbria, featuring Commissario Alessandro Cenni. 

Grace was a systems engineer for twenty years for various telecommunication companies, including Bell Labs, AT&T, and Verizon.  Before she began work as a systems engineer, she taught writing and literature at the City University of New York, at Queens and Hunter colleges.  In 1982 and 1986, Grace studied tapestry design with Carlos Delclaux, in Geronia, Spain.

While teaching at the City University of New York, Grace co-authored Writing Proficiency, a college textbook published by McGraw Hill, and Minimum Competencies, published jointly by CUNY and McGraw Hill.  The Last Enemy was published by Soho Crime in May 2007.  Her second novel in the series, A Deadly Paradise, was published by Soho in May 2008, and her third, The Absence of Death, will be published in 2012.