Grown-Ups

Katie grew up in the suburbs of Ottawa. An avid swimmer and movie-goer, she loved dreaming up plays for her friends to act out. She went to movie camp and took theatre workshops which eventually led to her landing the role of a spinster librarian in a grade eight school play…the pinnacle of her acting career.

After high school and a year traveling with the Katimavik youth program, Katie went on to study Film and English at Carleton University, TV Broadcasting at Algonquin College and filmmaking at the prestigious Summer Institute of Film and Television and Women in the Director’s Chair.

While studying and working in the restaurant business, she met and fell in love with a bartender. They married and had a daughter, Alexandra, who is now an elementary school teacher in Ottawa.

In the two decades that followed, Katie enjoyed an award-winning career as a screenwriter and director, collaborating on projects in animation, television and motion pictures. Supported by the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts, her films screened at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Sudbury Cinefest, Local Heroes International Film Festival and the NSI Film Exchange.

In 2013, Katie’s first-ever manuscript, Gone Monday, won top prize in the international Mslexia Women’s Novel Writing Competition. Buoyed by this unexpected success, and with her trusty golden retriever, Levi, by her side, Katie began writing another novel that was to become her publishing debut. The thriller Dark August is set in the Wellington West neighbourhood where she lives with her husband, Andy. The novel became an international bestseller and inspired a sequel. The follow-up to Dark August brings back her feisty protagonist for another cold case in the novel, Poison Lilies. Katie’s beloved Levi lives on in both novels.

Hannah Mary McKinnon: INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SUSPENSE NOVELS

I was born in Manchester, UK to British & Swiss parents. A year later they moved my older sister and me to Switzerland. Rather unsurprisingly I love mountains, chocolate and cheese…or mountains of chocolate and cheese, and my sister, of course.

After completing commercial studies in Geneva, I worked as a PA for DuPont. A year later I moved to Neuchâtel and became the Purchasing Manager for a high-tech company that made motors for industrial and space applications. While working, I returned to university, studying part-time for a Bachelor of Science. And then a friend of a friend introduced me to another friend who’d started up an IT recruitment business. I joined the company late 1995, and over the next fifteen years rose through the ranks to become CEO.

Things outside of work were hardly boring, either. A chance encounter back in the dark ages of the Internet in 1999 led me down the aisle with Rob, my Canadian rock, five months later. Actually it was exactly ten weeks after we met face-to-face at the Saint John airport in New Brunswick, Canada – and we’re still married. True story. Our first son was born in 2003, followed by identical twin boys just sixteen months later, so I’m heavily outnumbered (and at 5ft8 officially the shortest of the family).

My writing career began after we moved to Oakville in Ontario, Canada in 2010. Maybe it was the failed attempt at a start-up company, or an early mid-life crisis, but one morning I decided to follow my oldest passion, started writing, and never wanted to look back. My first book was a rom-com, but then I switched to the dark side of suspense (say it with me: muahahaha).

While I may never have enough time to get all of the ideas out of my head and on paper, I’ll be darned if I won’t have fun trying!

First comes love. Then comes murder.

Lucas Forester didn’t hate his wife. Michelle was brilliant, sophisticated, and beautiful. Sure, she had extravagant spending habits and that petty attitude, a total disregard for anyone below her status. But she also had a lot to offer. Most notably, wealth that only the one percent could comprehend.

For years, Lucas has been honing a flawless plan to inherit Michelle’s fortune. Unfortunately, it involves taking a hit out on her.

Every track is covered, no trace left behind, and now Lucas plays the grieving husband so well he deserves an award. But when a shocking photo and cryptic note show up on his doorstep, Lucas goes from hunter to prey.

Someone is on to him. And they’re closing in.

Told with dark wit and a sharply feminist sensibility, Never Coming Home is a terrifying tale of duplicity that will have you side-eyeing your spouse as you dash to the breathtaking end.