Caitlin Rother

Among the most dreaded words San Diego officials could hear over the phone the last several years were, “Hi, this is Caitlin Rother.…” Among those the region’s toughest investigative reporter profiled were Rep. Bob Filner, Assemblyman Juan Vargas, the Grossmont Union High School District board, the Inzuna family, Khourosh Hangarin, David Perez, Councilman Jim Madaffer and Carl de Maio. Now they can breathe easier.

Rother, a one-time Pullitzer nominee, left her job as a reporter for the Union-Tribune last month so she can pursue her second nonfiction book tentatively titled “Undercover Evil.” Rother, 43, says the book, a collaborative effort with John Hess, a former FBI agent, will detail the bizarre relationship between two ex-FBI agents once married to each other — Gene and Margo Bennett — and allegations of attempted murder, fraud and Margo Bennett’s alleged love affair with crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. Publisher of the hardcover is Jossey-Bass, an imprint of John Wiley & Sons. Tenative publication date is early 2008.

Her first nonfiction book, “Poisoned Love,” about the murder trial and conviction of Kristin Rossum, a toxicologist with the San Diego crime lab who killed her husband, Greg de Villers, has almost 80,000 copies in print, says Rother. It was published in July 2005 by Kensington/Pinnacle.

She has spent the last 19 years as a daily journalist and is now shopping around a first novel, which she describes as a “sexy psychological crime novel,” and has started a second one about a female investigative reporter at a fictitious San Diego newspaper. She says it is not about her or anyone at the U-T — too bad — but will be a compilation “based on a lot of people I’ve worked with over the years.”

Rother has previously worked at the Los Angeles Daily News, two newspapers in Massachusetts and as a freelancer for the Los Angeles Times. She says she quit the U-T after asking and being denied a leave of absence to concentrate on “Undercover Evil” by her editors. “They said I could reapply after I finish my book,” says Rother, “but I also have a couple of other nonfiction projects on the back burner and other proposals.” She refers people to her Web site: caitlinrother.com.

—Manny Cruz