Margaret Maron was a farmgirl near Raleigh, North Carolina and then lived in Brooklyn, New York. When she returned to North Carolina with her artist-husband, Joe, she began thinking about a series based on her own background and went on to write Bootlegger's Daughter, a Washington Post bestseller and winner of the major mystery awards for 1993. Her next Deborah Knott novel, Southern Discomfort, was nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Novel; Shooting at Loons, which followed, received Agatha and Anthony Award nominations; and Up Jumps the Devil won the Agatha for Best Novel of 1996. Home Fires is her sixth Deborah Knott mystery.

Margaret Maron's works have been translated into seven languages and are on the reading lists of various courses in contemporary Southern literature. They have also been nominated for every major award in the American mystery field.

She is a founding member of Sisters in Crime and served as its third president. She is also a past president of the American Crime Writers League, and past member of the national board of Mystery Writers of America.

Winner: Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, & Macavity Awards

North Carolina attorney Deborah Knott has done the unthinkable: tossed her hat into the heated race for district judge of old boy-ruled Colleton County. The only female candidate, she's busy defending indigent clients and reeling in voters. Then suddenly, the young daughter of Janie Whitehead begs her to help solve Janie's senseless, never-solved, eighteen-year-old murder. Deborah takes on the case; following twisted, typically Southern bloodlines, turning up dangerous, decades-old secrets, and inspiring someone to go on an all-out campaign to derail her future--political and otherwise.

Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD, is a loner. The daughter of a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist and a police officer shot in the line of duty when she was only a toddler, Sigrid has grown up in the shadow of a loving, if distracted mother and the mystique of a dead hero as father.

One Coffee With
1981
First novel. An art historian is poisoned in a fictional Manhattan College. Introduces Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD, and Oscar Nauman, Chairman of the Art Department.