Marisa Paxon

Marisa Paxon would like to assure you that she became a writer entirely by accident. She sat down one afternoon meaning to label a jar of strawberry preserve and emerged several hours later with a cozy Regency murder on her hands and no idea where the jar had gone. Matters have only deteriorated since.

She writes because people in the early nineteenth century had the good sense to suffer scandals, drink alarming quantities of tea, and commit murder at a frequency modern society simply cannot match. Also, she has been informed that readers enjoy romance, though she continues to regard this with polite suspicion.

When not coaxing her characters to stop poisoning one another long enough to fall in love, she can be found rearranging her bookshelves, misplacing her tea, or trying to explain to well meaning relatives that yes, this is her real job, and no, she cannot “just write something less peculiar.”

She lives in a house with far fewer servants than her heroines, considerably less laurel water, and an unwavering belief that a good mystery should be sharp, funny, and solved before the kettle boils.