https://mirabooks.typepad.co.uk > MIRA Authors

Deanna Raybourn

A sixth-generation native Texan, Deanna Raybourn graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio in English and History and an emphasis on Shakespearean Studies. She taught high school English for three years in San Antonio before leaving education to pursue a career as a novelist.
Fourteen years later, she signed a three-book deal with MIRA Books. "Sex, lies and awesome clothing descriptions" is how one reader has described Deanna`s debut novel, Silent in the Grave, published in December 2007. The first in the Silent series, the book follows Lady Julia Grey as she investigates the mysterious death of her husband with the help of enigmatic private inquiry agent Nicholas Brisbane. From the drawing rooms of the aristocracy to a Gypsy camp on Hampstead Heath, Silent in the Grave deftly captures the lush ambience of Victorian London.

The series continues with the second book, Silent in the Sanctuary (December 2008), a classic English country house murder mystery with a few twists and turns for Brisbane and Lady Julia along the way.

Deanna lives in Virginia with her husband and daughter.

Read Deanna’s blog:

http://deannaraybourn.typepad.com

Clare Shaw

Clare Shaw got her first taste for writing when she was asked to read out her story The Snail and the Caterpillar to the rest of her class of nine-year-olds. The story made the pupils laugh and the teacher cry, so Clare learnt at an early age that writing was an emotional business. Her effort at Maths also made the teacher cry and Clare then knew for certain that writing rather than accountancy would be her destiny.
Leaving school, she trained and worked as a speech and language therapist before discovering that she still preferred writing to talking. So she became a freelance writer contributing to parents magazines and writing five books offering advice to parents including Prepare Your Child for School and Help Your Child Be Confident. Clare then produced two daughters so that she could put her own advice into practice. This proved impossible so she returned to speech therapy and started to talk to people again. But the call of the word processor was loud and Clare wrote two plays – Hothouse performed in 2006 and The Glenn Miller Neurosis Programme performed in 2007. The Mother & Daughter Diaries is her first novel.

Behind every woman writer is a man bringing her cups of tea, and John boils her kettle at their home in Essex with help from their two daughters, Emma and Jessica.

More about this author:

www.clareshaw.com.

Alex Kava

With UK sales of over 250,000, Alex Kava is an established star of the thriller genre. Kava’s crisp prose and insightful attention to detail has earned frequent comparisons with Patricia Cornwell.

Alex Kava grew up in Nebraska, outside the small town of Silver Creek (population 500). As a child, Alex wrote short stories on the backs of old calendars and scrap paper, sharing them only with her younger brother and hiding them in a shoebox under her bed.

Alex earned an art scholarship to attend college. To pay living expenses, she worked in a nearby hospital’s central surgery department scrubbing equipment, utensils and basins from the morgue and surgery departments. She graduated from College of Saint Mary, in Omaha, Nebraska, with a B.A. in Art and English. She has advanced studies and certificates in advertising and marketing.

Alex then worked in graphic design, advertising, and public relations. She designed food packages and logos for national corporations, written brochures and newsletters, created a line of greeting cards, and directed TV and radio commercials.

During the summer of 1996, Alex quit her full-time job as a director of public relations in order to dedicate more time to writing fiction and getting published. To pay the bills, she resurrected her home-based graphic design firm, Square One. She refinanced her home, maxed out her credit cards, and even took on a newspaper delivery route.

Also in the summer of 1996, serial killer John Joubert was executed. Alex’s inspiration for A Perfect Evil was drawn from her experience while working at a small newspaper in the community where Joubert’s rampage had taken place in 1983. His execution reminded her of the terror and panic experienced, not only by that community, but by many parents across Nebraska.

Alex lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with her two dogs, Miss Molly and Scout.

More about this author: http://www.alexkava.com

Charles Davis

One late night in the spring of 1999, Charles Davis wondered what he would do if he could do anything he wanted in the whole world. In a moment that changed his life, he then wondered why he wasn`t doing just that.

A few weeks later, he said a warm farewell to his career as a federal law enforcement officer, sold or gave away everything he couldn`t cram into a U-Haul trailer, and with his dog riding shotgun in his pickup truck, drove a thousand miles from Maine to the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

There he rented a small beach house, got a part-time job in construction and had high hopes of completing his first novel by giving his old stories the time and energy they`d craved.

Charles is an avid fisherman and outdoorsman, a fair bluegrass guitar picker, thinks his homemade barbeque sauce is something special and is a college football fanatic.

His stories tend to wander here and there, but most eventually drift back down the dirt roads of his past to the hills and hollows of Southwest Virginia, the place where he grew up during the 1960s and 1970s. In his old hometown, stories told on front porches were as commonplace as brown beans and cornbread sitting on a supper table.

Charles attended Virginia Tech, graduated from Radford University and spent four years as an airborne infantry soldier before beginning a career with the U.S. Marshals Service. Angel’s Rest is his beautifully written debut novel. He currently lives in New Hampshire with his wife, two children and dog, and is working on his next novel. .

Chris Jordan

Chris Jordan is the pen name of Rodman Philbrick, who grew up on the New England coast, where he worked as a longshoreman and boat builder.

For many years he wrote mysteries and detective novels. The Private Eye Writers of America nominated two of his T.D. Stash series as best detective novel and then selected Brothers & Sinners as Best Novel in 1993. Writing under the pen name `William R. Dantz`, he has explored the near-future worlds of genetic engineering and hi-tech brain control in books like Hunger, Pulse, The Seventh Sleeper, and Nine Levels Down.

Inspired by the life of a boy who lived a few blocks away, he wrote Freak The Mighty, the award-winning young-adult novel, which has been translated into numerous languages and is now read in schools throughout the world. The book was adapted to the screen in 1998 as The Mighty, starring Sharon Stone, Gillian Anderson, James Gandolfini, Kieran Culkin, and Elden Henson.

Taken is his stunning UK thriller debut. He and his wife divide their time between Maine and the Florida Keys.

More about the author: http://www.rodmanphilbrick.com.

Debbie Macomber

Make time for friends, make time for Debbie Macomber.

Through both words and deeds, Debbie Macomber inspires women from all walks of life to realise their dreams.

She overcame the obstacles in her own life to become one of the world’s most popular writers. She encourages women to achieve the goals that burn in their hearts as fiercely as the desire to become a bestselling novelist did in her own.

When Debbie first decided to write a novel, people called her a hopeless dreamer. She had only a high school degree and was dyslexic. She was also the very young mother of four active children. No one believed she had what it took to write a book—except Debbie. She eventually saved enough money to rent an old typewriter, and every night when the children were asleep, she would sit down to write.

She wrote—for years. But each time she completed a story and mailed it off to a publisher, the manuscript was returned, stamped ""rejected."" As tough as it was to keep her spirits alive, Debbie never gave up. Five long years and thousands of pages later, she received a letter in the afternoon mail. The letter was from Silhouette Books—and they wanted to buy her story. Her first novel, Heartsong, was published as a Silhouette in 1984, and it became the first romance novel ever to be reviewed in Publishers Weekly.

Today, Debbie is the internationally acclaimed author of more than 100 novels and has sold over 50 millions copies. Popular around the globe, she receives approximately three thousand letters from readers every month. And she responds personally to each one.

In lectures around the country, Debbie encourages women to ""exercise the success muscle."" She also offers advice on how to achieve success in seeking or changing a career, building family relationships, forming healthy relationships and more.

Like her heartwarming novels, Debbie’s inspirational speeches are always filled with laughter and love. She cares deeply about the women she touches with her writing, and she continues to mentor people around the country. She also volunteers her considerable talents to help raise much-needed funds for battered-women’s shelters, literacy and medical research.

She lives with her husband in Port Orchard, Washington. Their children are grown and she is a proud grandmother.

More about this author:

www.debbiemacomber.com

Elizabeth Flock

Elizabeth Flock was obsessed with the news. As a correspondent for CBS News, she travelled the world to feed her hunger for the big story of the day. The handover of Hong Kong from British rule back to China, the historic meeting between Pope John Paul II and Fidel Castro in Havana, Cuba, and London's reaction to the death and funeral of Princess Diana — Flock covered them all. In between were plane crashes, race riots, floods and famine. Few knew that while she was jetting from one breaking news story to another she was battling clinical depression.

Network correspondents will be the first to tell of the personal sacrifice that's made to follow the story, to beat the competition. Marriages crumble, children grow estranged, friendships wither. Few, though, talk about the inward struggle to stay sane in the middle of chaos. Elizabeth's book But Inside I'm Screaming takes the reader into a fictionalised fight for sanity.

Soon after returning from living abroad in London, Elizabeth landed in San Francisco, reporting for both Time and People magazines. While she was at Time, her work included several cover stories, one investigating Chinese gang activity, another on the current movement toward the preservation of marriage, a third on the fiery siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. After five years of print reporting, Elizabeth was drawn to television. Soon she was anchoring and reporting at a 24-hour cable network based in San Francisco and writing for the NBC affiliate news station.

But New York beckoned, and after a freelance stint covering the crash of TWA Flight 800 for CBS, she was hired, handed a beeper and mobile phone and began working on the ulcer that would ultimately slow her down and change her life.

By 1998 Elizabeth knew she could no longer make the sacrifice required of a rising network star and instead chose the peaceful life of writing. Her debut novel Me & Emma became a bestseller, with over 100,000 copies sold in the UK.

A graduate of Vanderbilt University, Elizabeth is married, has two stepdaughters, four cats and a dog and lives in Chicago.

Erica Spindler

Catching a summer cold changed Erica Spindler’s life forever.

Up until that fateful malady, Erica planned on being an artist. She had studied for that profession, earning both a BFA and MFA in the visual arts. Then in June of 1982, she stopped at a local drugstore to pick up cold tablets and tissues; the cashier dropped a free novel into her bag. Once home, with nothing to do but sniffle and watch daytime TV, she picked up the novel and sometime during the next few months, she decided to try to write one herself.

The moment she put pen to paper, Erica knew she had found her true calling. Since that day, Erica has published more than twenty novels. Her titles have been published all over the world and critics have dubbed her stories as “thrill-packed, page turners, white knuckle rides, and edge-of-your-seat whodunits”.

The author of fast-paced, shocking thrillers, Erica Spindler’s writing is reminiscent of Karin Slaughter and Kathy Reichs at their best. She is a USA Today, New York Times and Amazon.com bestseller.

In 2002, her novel Bone Cold won the prestigious Daphne du Maurier Award for excellence.

Erica and her husband met in art school and have been together ever since. They have two sons, born nine and a half years apart. Erica makes her home in the New Orleans area, although she originally hailed from Illinois.

More about this author: www.ericaspindler.com.

Jane Sigaloff

British author Jane Sigaloff was born in London and, despite brief trips into the countryside, is a city girl at heart. Reading and writing from a very early age, she had her first entry in the school magazine when she was five, and was given her first dictionary when she was six.

Unsure whether to focus on arts or science subjects, at sixteen she opted for the former on the basis that a lab coat and safety goggles were unflattering; although she has been known to watch ER with a certain amount of longing. Having studied history at Oxford University, she entered the allegedly glamorous world of television, initially as tea-and-coffee coordinator for Nickelodeon U.K .

As she progressed to researcher and then assistant producer, her contracts took her to MTV and finally to the BBC, where assignments included a royal wedding interview. But it was her spell as a talk-show researcher that gave Jane a keen insight into human behaviour and — coupled with the experience of growing up as part of an extended dysfunctional-but-close family — gave her a lively sense of humour about relationships.

Both were reflected in her brilliantly funny debut novel, Confessions of an Agony Aunt, described by Booklist as "an engaging romantic comedy".

Written whilst juggling a job, her life and a laptop, Jane`s second novel, Lost & Found, hit the shelves in 2004 and was praised by Publishers Weekly for its""appealing cast of characters, sprightly dialogue and comic touch."

In 2003 Jane decided to take the plunge to write full time, and having spent several summers as a serial wedding attendee and a month dog-sitting in the Caribbean, she turned her attentions to the question of marriage, and so her third novel, Technical Hitch was born.

Having refused to succumb to the stereotype of a writer living alone by not owning a cardigan or a cat, but concerned that she was talking to inanimate objects more than was healthy, Jane acquired a puppy and a man as she started work on her next novel, Like Mother, Like Daughter.

Thirty-something and child-free, she soon realised that, stretch marks and breastfeeding aside, four-legged parenthood is more similar to having a baby than she could have possibly imagined.

Like Mother, Like Daughter, an age-gap romantic comedy for the Noughties, was published in March 2006. She is keen to state for the record that she has never to her knowledge fancied the same guys as, let alone shared a boyfriend with, her mother.

Although born and bred in the UK, Jane`s surname hints at a colourful family background, with her roots somewhere in Austria, the Czech Republic and Russia.

But since the Kids from Fame and the Brat Pack days of the 1980s, Jane`s been especially enthusiastic about all things American. As a student, she spent a month pondering the meaning of life (and sales tax) on a road trip across North America, and the following year returned to work as a camp counsellor — eight weeks with five-hundred children failing to dampen her enthusiasm for the States. As an adult she tries to visit New York as regularly as she can to top-up her energy levels and to shop at Banana Republic.

The Romancipation of Maggie Hunter is her wickedly funny fifth novel.

More about this author: http://www.janesigaloff.com

M.J. Rose

M.J. Rose is the international bestselling author of The Halo Effect, The Delilah Complex, The Venus Fix and The Reincarnationist.

Getting published has been an adventure for M.J. who self-published Lip Service late in 1998 after several traditional publishers turned it down. Editors had loved it, but didn`t know how to position it or market it since it didn`t fit into any one genre. Frustrated, but curious and convinced that there was a readership for her work, she set up a web site where readers could download her book and began to seriously market the novel on the Internet.

After selling over 2500 copies (in both electronic and trade paper format) Lip Service became the first e-book and the first self-published novel chosen by the LiteraryGuild/Doubleday Book Club as well as being the first e-book to go on to be published by a mainstream New York publishing house.

Rose has been profiled in Time magazine, Forbes, The New York Times, Business 2.0, Working Woman, Newsweek and New York Magazine.

M.J. graduated from Syracuse University, was a creative director at a New York City advertising agency and has a commercial in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She lives in Connecticut.

She is a founding member and board member of International Thriller Writers and the founder of the first marketing company for authors: AuthorBuzz.com. She runs two popular blogs; Buzz, Balls & Hype and Backstory.

The Venus Fix, the third book in the Dr Morgan Snow trilogy, has sold over 15,000 copies in the UK, and spent two weeks in The Bookseller’s Top 20 Fiction Heatseekers Chart.

More about this author:

www.mjrose.com
www.myspace.com/mjroseauthor

Marcia Preston

Marcia Preston grew up on a wheat farm in central Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plains. From her father, she learned the art of storytelling; from her mother, a reverence for books; and from Oklahoma`s red earth, a love of wildlife and the outdoors.

Preston`s bestselling UK debut novel, The Butterfly House, was chosen for WHSmith’s Fresh Talent promotion and went on to become a bestseller.

Her second book for the MIRA imprint, The Story of Us (published as The Piano Man in North America), deals with the emotional and psychological ripple effects of a heart transplant on the families of both donor and recipient.

Her next book, West of the Wall (published as Trudy`s Promise in North America), is about a young mother`s fight to regain her son when they are separated by the Berlin Wall.

Marcia earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of Central Oklahoma, taught in public high schools for more than a decade, and worked for a time as PR and publications director. For many years, she has edited and published ByLine, a trade magazine for aspiring writers (www.bylinemag.com). She also oversees the farm where she grew up, which was homesteaded by her grandparents.

Marcia lives with her husband, Paul, beside a creek in central Oklahoma, where she bird-watches, gardens and dodges tornadoes.

More about this author:
http://www.marciapreston.com

Maria V. Snyder

Maria V. Snyder changed from being a meteorologist to a novelist in 1995, when she began writing to keep her sanity while raising two children.

Since then, she has published numerous freelance articles in magazines and newspapers, and teaches fiction-writing classes at the local college and area libraries. The classes give her the wonderful opportunity to encourage fellow writers, and to keep improving her craft.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Maria always had a fascination with big storms.

Dreaming of chasing tornados, Maria earned a Bachelors of Science degree in Meteorology at Penn State University. But she discovered, much to her chagrin, that forecasting the weather wasn’t one of her skills. In order to chase tornados you had to predict where they might form. Creating fantasy worlds where she has complete control of the weather was more agreeable to her.

Maria’s research on food-tasting methods with an expert chocolate taster, her husband, turned out to be a delicious bonus while writing Poison Study.

Maria has a brown belt in Issinryu Karate, and has enjoyed ""acting out"" the complex fight scenes in her books. She also enjoys playing volleyball and the cello.

Travelling in general and via cruise ship in particular are her biggest distractions from writing. Maria has traveled to Belize, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean and through the Panama Canal.

Maria lives with her husband, son, daughter and yellow lab, Hazelnut, in Pennsylvania. She has recently earned a Master of Arts degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University.

Poison Study is Maria’s stunning, award-winning debut novel.

More about this author:
www.mariavsnyder.com
www.myspace.com/mariavsnyder