About the Author: Martha Grimes is one of the few authors left carrying on the British detective mystery tradition, and doing it well. Scotland Yard Superintendent Richard Jury and sidekick Melrose Plant are in the third decade of their clever, darkly humorous crime-solving careers.

"Although there were no murders and - alas! - no Sheriff DeGheyn, Hotel Paradise is otherwise the story of my 12-year-old life." Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (where her father was the City Solicitor), Martha Grimes spent every summer at her mother's hotel in Western Maryland. Her favorite memories of that time are her mother's cooking and her brother's theatrical productions in the big garage behind the hotel to which she was rarely admitted.

Grown-up, she now spends her time in Washington, D.C. with many side-trips to England.

A long-time Anglophile, it was her first poem in Send Bygraves that inspired her to turn from poetry to mystery novels. Martha sent the novel "over the transom" (sans agent) to several publishers. In 1979 an editor at Little, Brown, Inc. found the book in the "slush pile" (where unsolicited manuscripts are dumped for editorial assistants to read) and offered to publish The Man with a Load of Mischief with a first printing of 3,000 copies. The Man with a Load of Mischief was published in 1981, and from there Martha Grimes has published a book (sometimes two) every year for the past 25 years.

By her fourth and fifth books Martha received major review attention that not only lauded her ability as an American to write authentic British mysteries, but also to merge the conceits of the British form with the tone and atmosphere of the American.

Emma Graham
1. Hotel Paradise (1996)
2. Cold Flat Junction (2000)
3. Belle Ruin (2005)
4. Fadeaway Girl (2011)

Andi Oliver
1. Biting the Moon (1999)
2. Dakota (2008)