About
Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author, a writing professor, and she holds a PhD in English literature, a background that, as it turns out, is ideal for writing her upcoming standalone, The Dark Library, the story of a woman still menaced by her dead father whose rare book collection holds the secrets she needs to escape him.
Her current book, The Traitor Beside Her, takes advantage of Mary Anna’s degrees in physics and engineering to tell the story of Justine Byrne, who is working undercover in a Washington, DC code-breaking operation during World War II. Her assignment? To find a spy endangering many, many lives as the Battle of the Bulge unfolds. The first book in Mary Anna’s Justine Byrne series of historical mysteries, the Oklahoma Book Award-winning The Physicists’ Daughter, is named for Justine, whose physicist parents taught her things girls weren’t expected to know in 1944. Mary Anna describes Justine as “a little bit Rosie-the-Riveter and a little bit Bletchley Park code breaker.”
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Mary Anna’s mystery novels are available from all major outlets in hardcover, trade paper, ebook, large-print, and audio editions.
Her crime fiction has earned recognition that includes the Oklahoma Book Award, the Will Rogers Medallion Awards Gold Medal, the Mississippi Author Award, a spot on Voice of Young America’s (VOYA) list of “Adult Mysteries with Young Adult Appeal,” a writer’s residency from The Studios of Key West, the Benjamin Franklin Award, the Florida Historical Society’s Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Award, and three Florida Book Awards bronze medals.
In addition to writing crime fiction, she writes about crime fiction, as evidenced by the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity, and HRF Keating Award-nominated Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie, which she coedited with J.D Bernthal.
Her other fiction includes Wounded Earth, a suspense novel featuring environmental scientist Larabeth McLeod, and Jewel Box, a collection of short fiction and essays. Wounded Earth is available in trade paperback and ebook editions, and an audiobook edition will be released in November 2020. Her short story collection, Jewel Box, is available in paperback and ebook editions. Your Novel, Day by Day: A Fiction Writers Companion is a guide intended to take the aspiring novelist from blank page to finished book and it is, like Wounded Earth and Jewel Box, published by Joyeuse Press.
For the incurably curious, Mary Anna’s first published work, her master’s thesis, was entitled A Modeling Study of the NH3-NO-O2 Reaction Under the Operating Conditions of a Fluidized Bed Combustor. Like her mysteries, it was a factually based page-turner but, no, it’s not available online.
