About
Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author who spent more than a decade as a writing professor and she holds a PhD in English literature, a background that, as it turns out, is ideal for writing her recent release, 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.
Mary Anna’s earlier mystery series feature Justine Byrne, whom Mary Anna describes as “a little bit Rosie-the-Riveter and a little bit Bletchley Park code breaker,” and intrepid archaeologist Faye Longchamp, who has a real knack for digging up trouble.
Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Mary Anna’s mystery and historical suspense 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.C. Bernthal, and the upcoming Agatha Christie and the 20th Century Woman: Rewriting Female Justice, also from Bloomsbury.
Her other fiction includes Wounded Earth, a suspense novel featuring environmental scientist Larabeth McLeod, and Jewel Box, a collection of short fiction and essays. 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.
