Jan Burke’s bestselling books include Disturbance, The Messenger, and Bones, which won the Edgar for Best Novel. Her short stories have won the Agatha, the Macavity, and other awards.
She has a degree in history and loved doing the research for this story. She is currently at work on her next novel.
Laura Lippman is a New York Times bestseller who has published seventeen novels, a novella, and a collection of short stories. Her work, which includes the Tess Monaghan series and several stand-alone novels, has been published in more than twenty languages and has won multiple awards, including the Edgar. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans.
Libby Fischer Hellmann, an award-winning Chicago crime fiction author, has published ten novels. Her most recent, A Bitter Veil, is set in revolutionary Iran, and was released in April 2012. “War Secrets” is a prequel to that novel.
Libby’s other stand-alone thriller, Set the Night on Fire (2010), goes back, in part, to the late sixties in Chicago. She also writes two crime fiction series: one featuring Chicago PI Georgia Davis (three novels) and the four-novel Ellie Foreman series, which Libby describes as a cross between Desperate Housewives and 24.
Libby has also published fifteen short stories in Nice Girl Does Noir and edited the acclaimed crime fiction anthology Chicago Blues. She has been nominated twice for the Anthony Award and once for the Agatha. All her work is available digitally.
Originally from Washington, DC, she has lived in Chicago for thirty years and claims they’ll take her out of there feet-first.
More at her website: www.libbyhellmann.com.
C. E. Lawrence is the byline of a New York–based suspense writer, performer, composer, and prizewinning playwright and poet whose previous books have been praised as “lively…” (Publishers Weekly); “constantly absorbing…” (starred, Kirkus Reviews); and “superbly crafted prose” (Boston Herald). Silent Screams, Silent Victim, and Silent Kills are the first three books in her Lee Campbell thriller series. Her other work is published under the name of Carole Buggé. Titan Press recently reissued her first Sherlock Holmes novel, The Star of India.
Visit her online at http://celawrence.com.
Joseph Finder is the New York Times bestselling author of ten novels, whom the Boston Globe has called a “master of the modern thriller.” His most recent book, Buried Secrets, the second to feature “private spy” Nick Heller, received the 2011 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel. His first novel, The Moscow Club, was named by Publishers Weekly one of the ten best spy novels of all time. Killer Instinct was named Best Novel of the Year by the International Thriller Writers, and Paranoia is in production as a major motion picture starring Liam Hemsworth, Harrison Ford, and Gary Oldman. His novel High Crimes became a hit movie starring Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale, Joe did graduate work at the Harvard Russian Research Center and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He lives in Boston and Cape Cod.
James O. Born is the award-winning author of five police thrillers and a number of short stories. He is a recipient of the Florida Book Award. In 2009 he won the Barry Award for a short story in the Mystery Writers of America anthology The Blue Religion. He was also named one of the twenty-one Most Intriguing Floridians by Florida Monthly.
Under the pen name James O’Neal, he has written two near-future thrillers that have received critical praise. The Human Disguise and The Double Human are published by Tor. They are a fusion of police procedural and urban fantasy.
S. W. Hubbard’s most recent novel is Another Man’s Treasure. She is also the author of three mystery novels set in the Adirondack Mountains: Take the Bait, Swallow the Hook, and Blood Knot. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and the anthologies Crimes by Moonlight and Adirondack Mysteries. She lives in Morristown, New Jersey, where she teaches creative writing to enthusiastic teens and adults, and expository writing to reluctant college freshmen.
Joseph Goodrich is an alumnus of New Dramatists and an active member of Mystery Writers of America. His short story “Murder in the Sixth” appeared in the 2011 MWA anthology The Rich and the Dead, edited by Nelson DeMille. His plays have been produced across the United States and in Australia and are published by Samuel French, Playscripts, and Applause Books, among others. Panic was awarded the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Play. Joseph is the editor of Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947–1950 (Perfect Crime Books), and his nonfiction has appeared in Mystery Scene and Crimespree.
R. T. Lawton is a retired federal agent, a past member of the Mystery Writers of America board of directors, and a Derringer Award nominee for 2010 and 2011. He has published over eighty short stories, of which almost a third appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, where he has four ongoing series. Other publications include the anthology Who Died in Here?, the e-anthology West Coast Crime Wave, Easyriders, Outlaw Biker, and several mini-mysteries in Woman’s World magazine. Four of his short story collections in e-book form are currently available at Amazon.com for the Kindle and at Smashwords.com for other e-book readers. You can also find him at http://tinyurl.com/rtlawton and blogging at www.sleuthsayers.org.
Tom Rob Smith was born in 1979 to a Swedish mother and an English father and was brought up in London, where he still lives. He graduated from Cambridge University in 2001 and spent a year in Italy on a creative writing scholarship. Tom has worked as a screenwriter for the past five years, including a six-month stint in Phnom Penh storylining Cambodia’s first-ever soap. His first novel, Child 44, was long-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize, was short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award and the inaugural Desmond Elliott Prize, and won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best adventure/thriller novel of 2008, and the American edition won Best Debut at the International Thriller Awards and Best Debut at the Strand Magazine Critics Awards.
Former model and world traveler—in her early days she drove overland from Europe to India and the Himalayas via the Silk Route—Mary Anne Kelly returned to hometown Richmond Hill, Queens, New York, to write. From Park Lane South, Queens to Pack up the Moon, her Claire Breslinsky series portrays in mystery the life she leads.
Now settled in Rockville Centre, Long Island, with her husband and son, Mary Anne composes fiction and writes songs from the grandfather chair in her kitchen. She is currently on location in Munich, researching her next novel.
Tony Broadbent is the author of a series of mystery novels about a Cockney cat burglar in austerity-ridden, black market–riddled postwar London who gets blackmailed into working for MI5.
The first novel in the series, The Smoke, received starred reviews and was named “one of the best first mystery novels of 2002.” Spectres in The Smoke, the follow-up, received the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery Award in 2006 and was proclaimed by Booklist “one of the best spy novels of the year.” The third in the series, Shadows in The Smoke, was published in 2012. Skylon in The Smoke is next in the series.
Tony has written for newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and film and works as a consulting brand strategist and ideator. He was born in Windsor, England, and now lives with his American wife in Mill Valley, California.
Steve Berry is a New York Times and #1 internationally bestselling author who mixes action, history, secrets, conspiracies, and international settings into pulse-pounding contemporary thrillers. He is the creator of the Cotton Malone series, which started with The Templar Legacy and continued with The Alexandria Link, The Venetian Betrayal, The Charlemagne Pursuit, The Emperor’s Tomb, The Jefferson Key and his latest, The King’s Deception. He also has four stand-alone thrillers—The Amber Room, The Romanov Prophecy, The Third Secret, and his latest, The Columbus Affair—along with three e-book originals, The Balkan Escape, The Devil’s Gold, and The Admiral’s Mark. His books have been translated into forty languages and are sold in fifty-one countries worldwide. He lives in the historic city of St. Augustine, Florida. He and his wife, Elizabeth, founded History Matters, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving our heritage. To learn more about Steve, his books, and the foundation, visit www.steveberry.org.
After law school, Angela Gerst moved from New York to Massachusetts and over the years worked as a journalist, as a campaign consultant, in magazine sales, and in marketing. Long an admirer of Colette’s fiction, she wrote “The Secret Life of Books” after devouring a collection of Colette’s own short stories.
Her first novel, A Crack in Everything, a Susan Callisto mystery, won a starred review from Kirkus and praise from such disparate writers as Lisa Scottoline and John Barth. Angela is currently at work on the second novel in the Callisto mystery series. She and her husband live near Boston. Visit Angela, Susan Callisto, and Colette at angelagerst.com.
Catherine Mambretti learned at the University of Chicago that she wanted to write, not lecture about, fiction. Haunting the library stacks there, she discovered Kate Warne, the world’s first female detective. Catherine knew, even before earning her PhD in literature, that she had to write about “The Very Private Detectress,” a woman whose Civil War adventures included serving as the disguised Lincoln’s bodyguard and capturing a cunning female Southern spy.
Catherine is the author of a short story collection, The Evil That Men Do, and The Juror Hangs, a novel inspired by jury duty at Cook County’s notorious Criminal Courthouse. She is a Derringer Award nominee and the winner of a Textnovel.com Prize for Chalk Ghost, the novella that inspired her forthcoming novel, Snow Ghost. She is an active member of Mystery Writers of America and the Authors Guild. Visit her at www.ccmambretti.com.
Stephen Ross is a failed rock musician who turned to a life of crime. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and others. He has been nominated for an Edgar Award and a Derringer Award, and he was a 2010 Ellery Queen Readers Award finalist. Over the years, Stephen has lived in Auckland, London, and Frankfurt, but he currently resides on the beautiful Whangaparaoa Peninsula of New Zealand. He still writes and performs music, when no one is around, and he maintains a website at www.StephenRoss.net.
Caroline and Charles Todd, writing together as Charles Todd, are actually mother and son. Caroline lives in Delaware and Charles in North Carolina. They write best when not in the same room. Both travel to England to give their settings and their plots a firsthand realism. They are the authors of the Inspector Ian Rutledge Mysteries and the Bess Crawford Mystery Series, as well as many short stories.
Charles has been a corporate troubleshooter and holds a degree in business and communications. His favorite place is any beach, and his favorite team is Tar Heel basketball. He collects seashells from around the world, and he brakes for historical signs wherever he travels. A longtime Columbo fan, he is also a movie buff.
Caroline has degrees in history/literature and international relations. History has always been her first love and travel her second, although the Atlanta Braves are a close third. She collects bookmarks from the countries she visits, and shares Charles’s love of books and movies.
Jonathan Stone does most of his writing on the commuter train between the Connecticut suburbs and Manhattan, where he is the creative director of a midtown advertising agency. His four published crime novels have all been optioned for film, and when you see the proverbial pigs overhead, you can trot over to your local multiplex to catch one of them.
“When I read the parameters for The Mystery Box, I thought of a manuscript I had on the shelf that would fit perfectly. One problem: my manuscript was a novella—at 34,000 words, almost five times too long. So for me, writing ‘Hedge’ was a protracted, rigorous lesson in editing. Having it chosen for the anthology probably confirms once again that less is more. On the other hand, if anyone wants me to expand the short story into a novel?… hey, I’m your guy.”
A graduate of Yale, Jon is married, with a son in college and a daughter in high school.
Katherine Neville has been described as the female Umberto Eco, Alexandre Dumas, and Steven Spielberg. Her first swashbuckling adventure/quest novel, The Eight, was credited by Publishers Weekly with having “paved the way for books like The Da Vinci Code,” and was recently voted, in a national poll by the noted Spanish journal El País, one of the top ten books of all time. Neville is the first author invited onto the board of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries; she also serves in the Monticello Cabinet of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and is a regular cochair of the Authors Guild Foundation’s annual fund-raiser. Her bestselling books (New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post) have been translated into forty languages and have pleased millions of readers around the world. She lives in Virginia; Washington, DC; and Santa Fe.
R. L. (Robert Lawrence) Stine is one of the bestselling children’s authors in history. His Goosebumps series, along with such series as Fear Street, The Nightmare Room, Rotten School, and Mostly Ghostly, have sold nearly 400 million books in this country alone. And they have been translated into thirty-two languages.
His popular TV series, R. L. Stine’s The Haunting Hour, is in its third season on the Hub TV network.
The year 2012 marked the twentieth anniversary of the Goosebumps book series, which comprises over 100 books. In the same year, R.L.’s hardcover horror novel for adults, Red Rain, was published by Touchstone Books.
In 2011, R.L. was honored by the International Thriller Writers as ThrillerMaster at their annual banquet. R.L. lives in New York City with his wife, Jane, an editor and publisher, and their King Charles spaniel, Minnie.
Karin Slaughter has written twelve books that have sold a combined thirty million copies in thirty-two different languages. A longtime resident of Atlanta, she splits her time between the kitchen and the living room.