Lorenzo Carcaterra is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Sleepers, A Safe Place, Apaches, Gangster, Street Boys, Paradise City, Chasers, and Midnight Angels. He is a former writer/producer for Law & Order and has written for National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times Magazine, Details, and Maxim. He lives in New York City and is at work on his next novel.

John Connolly is a New York Times bestselling author known for his detective Charlie Parker mysteries. He also writes the supernatural collection Nocturnes, the Samuel Johnson Trilogy for younger readers, and with co-author Jennifer Ridyard the Chronicles of the Invaders series. His twenty-five novels, nonfiction, and short stories have won the Agatha, Barry, Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony Awards, as well as being finalists for the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, H. R. F. Keating Award, and Bram Stoker Award.

Thomas H. Cook was born in Fort Payne, Alabama, in 1947. He has been nominated for the Edgar Award seven times in five different categories. He received the best novel Edgar for The Chatham School Affair, the Martin Beck Award, the Herodotus Prize for best historical short story, and the Barry Award for best novel for Red Leaves, and has been nominated for numerous other awards.

J. A. Jance is the New York Times bestselling author of the Ali Reynolds series, the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, and a number of novels featuring the Walker family. Before becoming an author, she worked as a librarian and teacher on a Native American reservation.

Andrew Klavan is an Edgar Award-winning author, screenwriter, and media commentator. A number of his novels have been made into films, including True Crime, directed by Clint Eastwood, and Don't Say a Word, starring Michael Douglas.

His novels have been nominated for the Edgar Award five times, winning the award three times. In addition to his thrillers, Andrew has also written a The Homelanders series of books for young adults, as well as Klavan is a contributing editor to City Journal and his essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other places.

Elmore Leonard (1925-2013) wrote more than fifty books during his highly successful career, including the bestsellers Djibouti, Road Dogs, Mr. Paradise, Tishomingo Blues, and the critically acclaimed collection of short stories, When the Women Come Out to Dance. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty, Out of Sight, and Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown. He was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America.

Laura Lippman is a New York Times bestselling novelist who has won more than twenty awards for her fiction, including the Edgar Award--and been nominated for thirty more. Since her debut in 1997, she has published twenty-one novels, a novella, a children's book, and a collection of short stories. Her books have been translated into over twenty languages. Laura lives in Baltimore with her husband, David Simon, and their daughter.

Ed McBain is the most well known pseudonym of Evan Hunter (1926-2005), the author of over eighty novels and several famous screenplays. He is a recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award and the Diamond Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers Association. His books have sold more than one hundred million copies, ranging from the more than fifty titles in the 87th Precinct series to the bestselling novels written under his own name. McBain also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds.

Jay McInerney is the author of seven novels and two collections of essays on wine. He is a regular contributor to New York magazine, Guardian Weekly (London), and Corriere della Sera.

Walter Mosley is the New York Times author of more than fifty novels in several series, most notably fourteen Easy Rawlins mysteries, several of which have been made into major motion pictures. In 2020 he was a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and from the National Book Foundation. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame, and he is the winner of numerous awards, including an Edgar Award, O. Henry Award, the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award, PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award, a Grammy Award, and and several NAACP Image Awards. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages.

Joyce Carol Oates, an award-winning author of fiction, nonfiction, short stories, plays, and novellas, is the author of some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including two New York Times bestsellers. Her books have won the National Book Award, O. Henry Award, the Jerusalem Prize, and the National Humanities Medal, among others. Her work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize several times. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Otto Penzler is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. He was publisher of The Armchair Detective, the founder of the Mysterious Press and the Armchair Detective Library, and created the publishing firm Otto Penzler Books. He is a two-time Edgar Award-winner and the recipient of the Ellery Queen Award. A New York Times bestselling editor of numerous anthologies, his work includes Murder for Love, Murder for Revenge, Murder and Obsession, The 50 Greatest Mysteries of All Time, and The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century. He lives in New York City.

Anne Perry is the New York Times bestselling author of acclaimed series set in Victorian England. She has also written a series of five World War I novels, sixteen holiday novels, and a historical novel.

Ian Rankin is an award-winning crime writer best known for his Inspector Rebus novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Rather Be the Devil and Even Dogs in the Wild. He is a winner of the Edgar Award and the Crime Writers of America's Gold Dagger Award, among others, and was the recipient of a Raymond Chandler Fulbright Fellowship.

S. J. Rozan is the author of the acclaimed novel Absent Friends in addition the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, including Winter and Night, which won the Edgar, Nero, and Macavity Awards for Best Novel, and was nominated for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards. A native New Yorker, she is a former architect and lives in lower Manhattan.

Ellen Archer has narrated numerous audiobooks and has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards, as well as the prestigious Audie Award for best narration. She is an actress, and singer with a degree in opera performance from the Boston Conservatory. She has performed extensively on the New York stage and in regional theaters.

Patrick Lawlor, an award-winning narrator, is also an accomplished stage actor, director, and combat choreographer. He has worked extensively off Broadway and has been an actor and stuntman in both film and television. He has been an Audie Award finalist multiple times and has garnered several AudioFile Earphones Awards, a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and many starred audio reviews from Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews.

Michael Prichard is a Los Angeles-based actor who has played several thousand characters during his career, over one hundred of them in theater and film. He is primarily heard as an audiobook narrator, having recorded well over five hundred full-length books. His numerous awards and accolades include an Audie Award for Tears in the Darkness by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman and six AudioFile Earphones Awards. He was named a Top Ten Golden Voice by SmartMoney magazine. He holds an MFA in theater from the University of Southern California.

Simon Vance is an award-winning actor and an AudioFile Golden Voice with over fifty Earphones Awards and thirteen prestigious Audie Awards. He was named Booklist's very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009.

Alan Sklar, a graduate of Dartmouth, has excelled in his career as a freelance voice actor. Named a Best Voice of 2009 by AudioFile magazine, his work has earned him several Earphones Awards, a Booklist Editors' Choice Award (twice), a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and Audiobook of the Year by ForeWord magazine. He has also narrated thousands of corporate videos for clients such as NASA, Sikorsky Aircraft, IBM, Dannon, Pfizer, AT&T, and SONY.