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Adrienne Miller grew up dreaming about becoming many things: an actor, a writer, an astronaut, and a Solid Gold dancer. It took her three decades to decide on writing historical and paranormal romance. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her ridiculously talented musician husband and two sons.

Gigi Pandian is the child of cultural anthropologists from New Mexico and the southern tip of India. Originally on the academic path herself, she soon realized she was having much more fun writing about the fictional adventures of academics than being one herself. Before leaving a PhD program to pursue writing and art in the San Francisco Bay Area, Gigi lived in Seattle, southern California, Edinburgh, Bath, and London. Gigi's first mystery novel, Artifact, featuring treasure-hunting Indian-American historian Jaya Jones, was awarded a 2007 William F. Deeck Malice Domestic Grant for unpublished mystery writers, and was a finalist in the 2009 St. Martin's Press / Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery competition. She is awaiting news about where Artifact will find a home. Visit her at www.gigipandian.com.

L.G.C. Smith is a recovering academic with a passion for popular fiction. She's published both historical and contemporary romance, and taught writing and linguistics at UC Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. She is currently working on a series of novels following the lives of four seventh-century English warlord kings who mysteriously find themselves in the 21st century, caught up in someone else's war, asked to do the impossible.

Juliet Blackwell, aka Hailey Lind, is the pseudonym for a mystery author who, together with her sister, wrote the Art Lover's Mystery Series—including the Agatha-nominated Feint of Art and the IMBA bestsellers Shooting Gallery and Brush with Death. The fourth in the series, Arsenic and Old Paint, will be released in fall, 2010. Juliet's new paranormal Witchcraft Mystery series begins with Secondhand Spirits (July, 2009), about a witch with a vintage clothing store in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Cast-off Coven will be the second in the series. If These Walls Could Talk, to be released in 2010, is the first in the Sophie Tanner Historic Home Renovation series about a failed anthropologist running her father's high-end construction company. A former anthropologist and social worker, Juliet has worked in Mexico, Spain, Cuba, Italy, the Philippines, and France. She currently resides in a happily haunted house in Oakland, California, where she is a muralist, portrait painter, and recipient of the overly zealous attentions of her neighbor's black cat, who seems to imagine himself her new familiar. Juliet/Hailey is two-term president of Northern California Sisters in Crime. Visit her at www.julietblackwell.net.

Lisa Hughey has always been intrigued with espionage. Her first taste of sleuthing came from the adventures of Harriet the Spy, then she graduated to Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, before moving on to more sophisticated reads. Her first attempt at writing romance was a fourth grade assignment about falling in love and getting engaged. Combining her two passions, she began dreaming up romantic suspense plots with spy heroines. She currently has an espionage trilogy out on submission and is furiously plotting more suspense books. She lives in Northern California with her husband, three very accommodating kids, and one messy house because if you notice, in spy stories, no one ever cleans. Visit her at www.lisahughey.com.

Martha Flynn has lived on three continents but hates to fly, loves the environment but avoids nature, and is addicted to musicals but can't sing. She works a 9 to 5 desk job but spends her 5 to 2 reading outside her budget, watching unhealthy amounts of television, and dancing with mediocrity. She is a complete fan girl of all things Whedon and over-squees at unrequited love triangles and triumphant comebacks. She lives in San Francisco where she indulges in behaviors deemed way too young for her age including the reading and writing of young adult novels. Visit her at www.marthaflynn.com.

Rachael Herron received her MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College. She lives in Oakland, CA with her family and has way more animals than she ever planned to, though no sheep or alpacas (yet). She learned to knit at the age of five, and generally only puts the needles down to eat, write, or sleep, and sometimes not even then. Her first book in the Cypress Hollow Yarns series, How to Knit a Love Song, will be out from Avon A in March, 2010. Visit her at www.yarnagogo.com.

Sophie's first novel (A Bad Day for Sorry, St. Martin's Minotaur, August '09) features a rural Missouri housewife-turned-vigilante. Her young adult novel, Banished, will be released in fall 2010. Her award-winning short stories have appeared in a variety of publications. Sophie lives in Northern California with her husband and two teenagers. Visit her at www.sophielittlefield.com.