Winner of the 2009 Lifetime Achievement award for mystery writing from Romantic Times magazine, Nancy Martin announces the release of the 8th book in her popular Blackbird Sisters mystery series, NO WAY TO KILL A LADY. Set in Philadelphia, the story features three heiresses whose parents have run off with their trust funds. Now thay have a chance to regain their wealth when their aunt, "Madcap Maddy" Blackbird dies in a volcano and leaves her estate to the sisters. But Nora Blackbird soon discovers all the treasures in Aunt Maddy's house have disappeared...information that leads her to believe maybe Maddy didn't die the way everybody thinks. Author of 48 pop fiction novels in mystery, suspense, historical and romance genres, Nancy created The Blackbird Sisters in 2002—- mysteries about three impoverished heiresses who adventure in couture and crime—as if “Agatha Christie had wandered onto the set of Sex and The City.” Nominated for the Agatha Award for Best First Mystery of 2002, HOW TO MURDER A MILLIONAIRE won the RT award for Best First Mystery and was a finalist for the Daphne DuMaurier Award. Currently, she is at work on the Roxy Abruzzo mystery series for St. Martin’s Minotaur. In 2009 she received the Romantic Times Lifetime Achievement Award for mystery writing. Nancy lives in Pittsburgh, serves on the board of Sisters in Crime and is a founding member of Pennwriters. Find her on Pinterest and Facebook.

Patricia Ann McNair has lived 98 percent of her life in the Midwest. She’s managed a gas station, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and taught aerobics. Today she teaches in the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago, where she received the Excellence in Teaching Award as well as a nomination for the Carnegie Foundation’s US Professor of the Year. McNair’s fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in various anthologies, magazines, and journals including American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, Other Voices, F Magazine, Superstition Review, Dunes Review, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and others. She is also published in The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction edited by Dinty W. Moore. She’s received numerous Illinois Arts Council Awards and Pushcart Prize nominations in fiction and nonfiction. McNair divides her time between city and small town with her husband, the visual artist Philip Hartigan