Bio

Halloween at Bouchercon, 10/31/2019. Dallas, Texas

Maggie King is the author of the Hazel Rose Book Group Mysteries. She’s also published short mysteries for anthologies, including Murder by the Glass and 50 Shades of Cabernet. She belongs to International Thriller Writers, James River Writers, Short Mystery Fiction Society, and is a founding member of Sisters in Crime Central Virginia, where she manages the Instagram account.

Maggie graduated from North Plainfield High, Elizabeth Seton College, and earned a B.S. degree in Business Administration from Rochester Institute of Technology. She spent one summer during her college years in Europe with the American Institute for Foreign Study. The students lived at a camp near Ipswich, England for a month and worked on farms, picking fruit and weeding potatoes. Then Maggie traveled through Europe, touring France, Netherlands, Germany, and Luxembourg. She accompanied a group of Polish students from the camp back to their home and stayed for a week. She visited Warsaw, Krakow, Bydgoszcz, Gdansk, and Auschwitz. This was during the Communist regime and was a heady experience for a naive nineteen year old.

Like a couple of her fictional characters, she migrated to Los Angeles and spent many years there, working, traveling, and having a lot of fun. There she met the love of her life, also an East Coast transplant. Glen and Maggie married in 1989 at the Wee Kirk o’ the Heather, a chapel at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. It’s the site of Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman’s 1940 wedding. In 1996 Glen and Maggie moved back East and continue to appreciate the changing of the seasons they missed during their California years. But they still yearn for the west coast.

Over the years Maggie worked as a retail sales manager and customer service supervisor before taking on her longest stint as a software developer. For a time she had a computer training business, designed websites, and held administrative positions for non-profits.

But her passion is writing. Under the influence of Nancy Drew and the Dana Girls Maggie wrote mysteries and read installments to her friends while walking home from grade school. By high school she had drifted away from mystery writing and found an outlet for her considerable adolescent angst in poetry and journal entries. In the late nineties she took up mystery writing again. She attended writing classes, intimidated by those who found it so easy to produce eloquent turns of phrase during impromptu exercises. It took years to write Murder at the Book Group but it finally landed on bookshelves in December of 2014. This story went through so many evolutions that she finally had to say, “Enough! Any more changes go into my next book.” More novels and short mysteries followed, and they keep on coming! Check her books and short stories pages.

When Maggie isn’t writing she enjoys reading, walking, traveling, movies, British TV shows, and the theatre. She can cook a mean chili!

Maggie has called New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California home. These days she lives in Richmond, Virginia, with Glen and their cat, Olive. Their beloved Morris passed away in 2023. He was a handsome orange and white Manx while Olive is a glam and big-pawed Norwegian Forest cat with a hunting prowess that would have made the goddess Diana proud. All our cats, those with us and those who live across the rainbow bridge, make #Caturday appearances on Instagram.

MandO

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