Participating Writers
Top row, left to right: Gerry Boyle, Matt Cost, Jessica Ellicott, Kate Flora, Tiffany Ford
2nd row, L-R: Tess Gerritsen, Juliet Grames , Vaughn Hardacker, Katrina Niidas Holm, Chris Holm
3rd row, L-R: Zakariah Johnson, Michael Koryta, BJ Magnani, Katherine Hall Page, Stephen Rogers
4th row, L-R: Cameron Rosenblum, E.K. Sathue, Gabriella Stiteler, and Carolyn Wilkins
And below, the 2024 Maine Crime Wave Planning Committee, L-R: Brenda Buchanan, Richard Cass, Barbara Kelly, Barbara Ross, Gayle Lynds, Jule Selbo
Gerry Boyle is the author of 17 crime novels, including the acclaimed Jack McMorrow mystery series. His latest McMorrow novel is Hard Line. Previous McMorrow novels, including Random Act and Straw Man, were awarded the Maine Literary Award for crime fiction. Boyle is also the author of the Brandon Blake mystery series, featuring a rookie Portland police officer. His novels have been published in a half-dozen languages. Boyle's fiction is set in Maine, often in rural parts of the state where his reporter protagonist searches for stories and frequently finds trouble. The author lives in central Maine in a village on a lake. In addition to writing crime fiction, he has been a newspaper reporter and columnist, and for many years was editor of the Colby Magazine, published by Colby College, his alma mater.
Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. Love in a Time of Hate is the third historical by Cost, and I am Cuba was published in 2020. Cost has also published the Mainely Mystery series including Mainely Power (a Read ME fiction book of the year), Mainely Fear, Mainely Money, and Mainely Angst. Cost also writes the Clay Wolfe/Port Essex Trap series with Wolfe Trap, Mind Trap, and Mouse Trap. Cosmic Trap will be released in December. Cost now lives in Brunswick, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix.
Agatha award nominee Jessica Ellicott loves fountain pens, red convertibles and throwing parties. She lives in northern New England where she obsessively knits wool socks and enthusiastically speaks Portuguese with a shocking disregard for the rules of grammar. She indulges her passion for historical fiction and all things British by writing the Beryl and Edwina Mysteries and the forthcoming WPC Billie Harkness Mysteries. Jessica’s books have twice received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly as well as one from Library Journal. Her first novel won the Daphne du Maurier award for mystery. As Jessica Estevao she wrote The Change of Fortune Mysteries. When inspiration strikes, she writes contemporary mysteries as Jessie Crockett.
Kate Flora grew up on a chicken farm in Maine where the Friday afternoon trip to the library was the high point of her week. After law school, she worked in the Maine attorney general’s office, protecting battered kids, chasing deadbeat dads, and representing the Human Rights Commission. Flora is the author of twenty-six books spanning many genres including crime fiction, true crime, memoir, and nonfiction, and many short stories, Flora’s been a finalist for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Derringer awards. She won the Public Safety Writers Association award for nonfiction and twice won the Maine Literary Award for crime fiction. Flora has taught writing for the MWPA, Brown University Continuing Education, The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, the Cape Cod Writer’s Conference. Her latest books include the stand-alone domestic suspense Teach Her a Lesson, published in May, 2023 by Encircle Publications, and Death Sends a Message, the 12th Thea Kozak mystery. She’s in many anthologies and some her stories are collected in: Careful What You Wish For. Flora is a founding member of the New England Crime Bake and the Maine Crime Wave. With two other crime writers, she started Level Best Books, where she worked as an editor and publisher for seven years. She served a term as international president of Sisters in Crime, an organization founded to promote awareness of women writers’ contributions to the mystery field.
Tiffany Ford is Maine’s only forensic document examiner and is an analyst for the Cold Case Foundation. She is a former full-time government document examiner for the ATF and apprenticed with world-renowned document examiner, Jim Blanco, of Blanco & Associates Inc. of San Francisco & Los Angeles. She lives in Rockport, Maine with her children and is currently writing her first crime novel.
Tess Gerritsen’s first medical thriller, Harvest, was released in hardcover in 1996, and it marked her debut on the New York Times bestseller list. Her novels have hit bestseller lists ever since. Among her titles are Gravity, The Surgeon, Vanish, The Bone Garden, and The Spy Coast. Her books have been translated into 40 languages, and more than 40 million copies have been sold around the world. She has won both the Nero Wolfe Award and the Rita Award. Publishers Weekly has dubbed her the “medical suspense queen” and Time Magazine named her novel The Surgeon one of the best mystery/thriller novels ever written. Her series of novels featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the hit TNT television series "Rizzoli & Isles," starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander. Gerritsen and her son Josh produced a feature-length documentary, “Magnificent Beast,” about the ancient origins of the pig taboo. It aired on PBS channels around the country. Their previous film, “Island Zero”, was a feature-length horror movie that was released in 2018.
Vaughn C. Hardacker is a 5th cousin twice removed to Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Massachusetts fame. Therefore, it’s no surprise that he became a writer of mysteries & thrillers. Hardacker is a member of the New England chapter of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), the International Thriller Writers (ITW), and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. He is an avid reader of mysteries and crime/thrillers and has published seven thriller novels. Among these are Sniper (finalist in the 2015 Maine Literary Awards Crime Fiction Category), The Fisherman (finalist in the 2016 Maine Literary Awards Crime Fiction Category), and his personal favorite, Wendigo (finalist in the 2018 Maine Literary Awards Fiction Category). Encircle Publications released his seventh novel, Ripped Off, in January 2023.
Katrina Niidas Holm is a freelance writer and book reviewer who regularly contributes to Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Mystery Scene Magazine. She also did time with The Life Sentence as an editor and social media maven. She lives in Portland with her husband, writer Chris Holm.
Chris Holm is the author of the cross-genre Collector trilogy, the Michael Hendricks thrillers, and the standalone biological thriller Child Zero, published by Mulholland Books. Lee Child calls the book "Intense, propulsive, provocative—and shot through with the kind of been-there, done-that authenticity and expertise that makes it really scary... highly recommended." Holm’s work has been selected for the Best American Mystery Stories, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and won a number of awards, including the 2016 Anthony Award for Best Novel. He lives in Portland.
Zakariah Johnson plucks banjos and pens horror, thrillers, and crime fiction on the banks of the Piscataqua. He's the author of the short-story collection Egg on Her Face (2022) and the '90s ecoterrorism mystery Mink: Skinning Time in Wisconsin (2023), described as "The Monkey Wrench Gang meets Psycho." Throughout 2024, Johnson is writing a monthly crime-author interview for Mystery Tribune.
The 2024 Maine CrimeMaster, Michael Koryta (pronounced Ko-ree-ta) is a New York Times-bestselling author whose work has been lauded by Stephen King, Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Lisa Unger, Dean Koontz, James Patterson, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and Sandra Brown among many others, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. His books have won or been nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Edgar Award, Shamus Award, Barry Award, Quill Award, International Thriller Writers Award, and the Golden Dagger. They’ve been selected as “best books of the year” by publications including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com, O the Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, People, Reader’s Digest, iBooks, and Kirkus Reviews.
BJ Magnani’s fascination with toxicology led her to a career in pathology and laboratory medicine. She is currently Professor of Anatomic and Clinical Pathology Emerita at Tufts University School of Medicine and writes the Dr. Lily Robinson series about a poison-savvy physician recruited by the U.S. government as an assassin.
Katherine Hall Page’s first mystery, The Body in the Belfry, was the 1991 Agatha Award winner for Best First Mystery Novel. The fifteenth book in the series, The Body in the Snowdrift , won the 2006 Agatha Award for Best Mystery Novel. William Morrow published the 26th in Katherine’s Faith Fairchild series, The Body in the Web, in 2023. She was also awarded the 2001 Agatha for Best Short Story and has been a nominee or finalist for an Edgar and multiple Agathas, Maine Literary Awards, and Mary Higgins Clark Awards. Katherine received the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from Malice Domestic and the 2022 Maine CrimeMaster from MWPA, and the Mystery Writers of America named her a 2024 Grand Master.
Stephen D. Rogers is a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Over eight hundred of his stories and poems have been selected to appear in more than three hundred publications, earning among other honors two "Best of Soft SF" winners, two Derringers, a Shamus Award nomination, a Black Orchid Novella finalist, a Rhysling nomination, two "Notable Online Stories" from storySouth's Million Writers Award, honorable mention in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, mention in The Best American Mystery Stories, and numerous Readers's Choice awards. Stephen is a proud member of the Mystery Writers of America, the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Stephen's writing advice has appeared in Write Now! Mysteries, Writer's Digest, and Writing World. He's taught writing workshops for Crime Bake, Romance Writers of America / Kiss of Death, Savvy Authors, Sisters in Crime / Guppies, Writers College, Writers University, and Writing World. His webinar "Selling to Anthologies" is now available from Writer's Digest Tutorials.
Cameron Kelly Rosenblum is the author of The Stepping Off Place, named a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Top 10 YA Dealing with Mental Health. Her second novel, The Sharp Edge of Silence, releases 4/11/23 in the US and UK and is a finalist for an Edgar Award. Her books have been translated into Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and German. Cameron has been a teacher and a children's librarian. She lives on the Maine coast with her family.
E.K. Sathue is a pseudonym for the author Erin Mayer. A native New Yorker, she wrote her first haunted house story in Mr. Palladino’s third-grade class and never looked back. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Bustle, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens, Literary Hub, CrimeReads, Business Insider, and Man Repeller. She lives in Maine with her partner, Benjamin Perry, and their beloved haunted doll, Persephone. youthjuice, her horror debut, described as American Psycho meets The Devil Wears Prada, will be out in June from Hell's Hundred, a new Horror Fiction imprint from independent publisher Soho Press.
Gabriela Stiteler is a crime writer and educator based in Portland, where she lives with her husband, two sons, and dog. Her debut short story was nominated for the Mystery Writers of America Robert L. Fish award. She has been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Wolfsbane: The Best of New England Crime Stories. She's a member of Mystery Writers of America, the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and Sisters in Crime New England. She is the current co-chair for the Crime Bake, a three day crime writing conference for New England authors. Lately she’s been thinking about how bad a person can be before they’re irredeemable.
Carolyn Marie Wilkins is the author of Death at a Séance, Melody for Murder, Mojo for Murder, Damn Near White and They Raised Me Up. She is a psychic medium, a Reiki Master and a priestess of Yemaya, the African goddess of motherhood. A Professor at Berklee College of Music Online, Carolyn has performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony and toured as a Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. State Department.
The 2024 Maine Crime Wave Planning Committee:
Brenda Buchanan brings years of experience as a journalist and a lawyer to her crime fiction. She has published three books featuring Joe Gale, a newspaper reporter who covers the crime and courts beat, and is now hard at work on new projects. Buchanan also helped found the Maine Crime Wave.
Richard Cass is the author of the Elder Darrow jazz mystery series. The first book, Solo Act, was a finalist for the 2017 Maine Literary Awards in Crime Fiction and its prequel, In Solo Time, won the 2018 Maine Literary Award in Crime Fiction. He has also published a book of short stories entitled Gleam of Bone. Cass serves on the board of Mystery Writers of America’s New England Chapter and blogs with the Maine Crime Writers at mainecrimewriters.com. His fiction and nonfiction have also appeared in Playboy, Gray’s Sporting Journal, ZZYZVA, and Best Short Stories of the American West. Cass lives in Cape Elizabeth and continues to enjoy participating in conference panels on crime writing and giving readings and talks at Maine's libraries and bookstores.
New York Times-bestselling author Gayle Lynds is the award-winning author of 10 novels, including The Assassins and The Book of Spies. Library Journal hails her as the reigning queen of espionage fiction. With David Morrell she cofounded ITW and ThrillerFest.
Barbara Ross is the author of twelve Maine Clambake Mystery novels and six novellas. Her books have been nominated for multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and have won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Barbara lives in Portland.
Jule Selbo’s 10 DAYS: A Dee Rommel Mystery received a starred Kirkus review and a place on Kirkus’ 2021 best crime/mysteries from independent publishers. It’s been nominated for a Clue and a Foreword Review Award. Several years ago, she left Hollywood (where she focused on screenwriting, including work for Disney, Lucasfilm, HBO and more) for Portland, to write novels. After three historical fiction novels, she focused on her favorite genre – the crime/mystery – and recently completed the third in her series: 8 DAYS, A Dee Rommel Mystery.