Mary Jane Maffini was a 1999 double-nominee for the Crime Writers’ of Canada Arthur Ellis awards. Speak Ill of the Dead was shortlisted for best first novel and “Kicking the Habit” in Menopause is Murder was shortlisted for best short story. Her story “But the Corpse Can’t Laugh” made the Top Ten in the Readers’ Choice awards in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Prior to that, she was the 1995 winner of the Arthur Ellis award for best short story, “Cotton Armour” in The Ladies Killing Circle, and in 1994 she won the Ottawa Citizen’s Short Story Contest for “Death Before Doughnuts”.

Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines: from Chatelaine and Storyteller to On-Spec, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Over My Dead Body as well as in Canadian mystery anthologies such as The Ladies Killing Circle, Cottage Country Killers, Menopause is Murder, Cold Blood V, The Best of Cold Blood, Over the Edge and the RendezVous Crime anthologies, Fit to Die (2001), Bone Dance (2003) and When Boomers Go Bad (2005).

Her second mystery, The Icing on the Corpse, was published in September 2001, followed in 2002 by Little Boy Blues. After a break in the MacPhee series to introduce a new sleuth, Fiona Silk, in Lament for a Lounge Lizard (2003), Maffini revived Camilla with The Devil’s In the Details (2004), and The Dead Don't Get Out Much (2005). Lament for a Lounge Lizard was shortlisted for best novel in the 2004 Arthur Ellis Awards. Mary Jane is also the author of the Charlotte Adams series for Berkeley Prime Crime Mysteries. Her latest releases for RendezVous Crime are the second Fiona Silk novel, Too Hot to Handle (fall 2007) and the sixth MacPhee novel, Law and Disorder (fall 2009).

A native of Sydney, Nova Scotia and a graduate of Dalhousie University, she is a lapsed librarian and former bookstore owner and CBA board member. Currently, she is the former President of the Crime Writers of Canada.

Links: www.maryjanemaffini.ca