Bruce Robert Coffin is the award-winning author of the Detective Byron Mysteries. A former detective sergeant, he supervised all homicide and violent crime investigations for Maine's largest city. Following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Bruce spent 4 years investigating counter-terrorism cases for the FBI, earning the Director's Award, the highest award a non-agent can receive. His short fiction appears in a number of anthologies, including Best American Mystery Stories 2016. www.brucerobertcoffin.com

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. She dreamed of being able to create the kind of compelling, enchanting worlds of the books she disappeared into every week, but growing up in the era when “help wanted” ads were still sex-segregated, she felt her calling was to go to law school and get the job they told her she couldn’t have. After law school, Kate worked in the Maine attorney general’s office, protecting battered kids, chasing deadbeat dads, and representing the Human Rights Commission. Those years taught her all a crime writer needs to know about the human propensity to commit horrible acts. After some years in private practice, she decided to give writing a serious try when she quit the law to stay at home for a few years with her young sons. That ‘serious try’ led to ten tenacious and hellacious years in the unpublished writer’s corner, followed, finally, by the sale of her Thea Kozak series. Kate’s eighteen books will include eight Thea Kozak mysteries, five gritty Joe Burgess police procedurals, a suspense thriller (written under the name Katharine Clark), two true crime books, Death Dealer and Finding Amy (co-written with Joseph Loughlin, a Portland, Maine Deputy Police Chief), a Maine game warden's memoir, A Good Man with a Dog, co-written with Roger Guay, and a book about police shootings from the police point of view, Shots Fired: The misunderstandings, misconceptions, and myths about police shootings, co-written with Joseph K. Loughlin. Finding Amy was a 2007 Edgar nominee as well as a Maine Literary Award finalist, and has been optioned for a movie. Kate’s award-winning short stories have been widely anthologized and Redemption and And Grant You Peace, her third and fourth Joe Burgess mysteries, won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Flora's fiction, nonfiction, and short fiction have been finalists for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Derringer Awards. She is a founding member of the New England Crime Bake, the region's annual mystery conference, and the Maine Crime Wave. With two other crime writers, she started founded 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. Currently, she teaches writing and does manuscript critiques for Grub Street in Boston. She has two sons (one into film and the other into photovoltaics) two lovely daughters-in-law, an adorable eight-year-old grandson and five granddogs, Frances, Otis, Harvey, Oscar, and Daisy. When not conducting research for her novels and nonfiction—research that includes riding an ATV through the Canadian woods or hiding in a tick-infested field waiting to be found by search and rescue dogs—Kate can often be found in her garden, waging war against the woodchucks and her husband’s lawnmower, or in the kitchen, devising clever and devious ways to get the men in her life to eat their vegetables.

Jeannette de Beauvoir is the bestselling author of the Sydney Riley (Provincetown) mystery series and the Martine LeDuc (Montréal) mystery series. She also writes some historical fiction out of a true love of the past and a desire to make her decades of student loan payments for history degrees make sense. She always writes about strong and smart female protagonists, perhaps in the hope that one day she'll be more like them. She lives in a small cottage at the tip of Cape Cod and begins her days with a walk on the beach. Well, most days. February is a little challenging.

Edith Maxwell is an Agatha-winning mystery author who writes the Local Foods Foods Mysteries as well as the historical Quaker Midwife Mysteries, featuring a Quaker midwife sleuth in 1888. As Maddie Day, she writes the Country Store Mysteries set in southern Indiana, and the Cozy Capers Book Group Mysteries. Her short stories have appeared in twenty juried anthologies and magazines. She is active in Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime. Edith, a fourth-generation Californian, has two grown sons and lives in an antique house north of Boston with her beau, their energizer kitten, a small organic garden, and some impressive garden statuary. She worked as a software technical writer for almost two decades but now writes fiction full time.