Donna Andrews

Photo Credit: Joe Henson Photography

Like Meg Langslow, the ornamental blacksmith heroine of her series from St. Martin's Press, Donna Andrews was born and raised in Yorktown, Virginia. These days she spends almost as much time in cyberspace as Turing Hopper, the artificial intelligence who appears in her technocozy series from Berkley Prime Crime.

Although she read widely as a child, especially in fantasy and science fiction, her love of mystery developed during her college years (and particularly at exam time.) Andrews attended the University of Virginia, majoring in English and Drama with a concentration on writing. After graduation, she moved to the Washington, D.C. area and joined the communications staff of a large financial organization, where for two decades she honed her writing skills on nonfiction and developed a profound understanding of the criminal mind through her observation of interdepartmental politics.

In the fall of 1997 she started on the road to publication by submitting her first completed mystery manuscript to the Malice Domestic/St. Martin's Press Best First Traditional Mystery contest. Upon learning that Murder with Peacocks had won, she acquired a copy of Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern Birds and settled down to have fun in her fictional world for as long as she could get away with it. Murder with Peacocks won the Agatha, Anthony, Barry, and Romantic Times awards for best first novel and the Lefty award for the funniest mystery of 1999. Subsequent books have also received Agatha and Lefty nominations, and Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon won the Toby Bromberg Award for Excellence (presented by Romantic Times) for the Most Humorous Mystery of 2003. Owl's Well That Ends Well (April 2005), the sixth book in the series, features a murder at a giant yard sale. No Nest for the Wicket (August 2006), the seventh book, explores eXtreme Croquet, and in the most recent book, The Penguin Who Knew Too Much (August 2007), Meg discovers penguins--and a body--in her basement. November 2005 saw the release of Delete All Suspects, the fourth book in the Turing Hopper series--which was partly inspired by her experience serving as a translator between the marketing and systems departments at her day job. Andrews notes that in these books she seeks to use computers and other technology accurately without making the action incomprehensible for readers who prefer whodoneits to computer manuals--and Delete All Suspects, she achieves a long-time ambition of killing off a spammer, even if only on paper. The first book in the series, You've Got Murder, won the Agatha award for best mystery of 2002, and was followed by Click Here for Murder and Access Denied. A member of MWA, Sisters in Crime, and the Private Investigators and Security Association, Andrews spends her free time gardening and conquering the world (but only in Civiliation IV).

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