The Author

Mary Anna Evans has degrees in physics and engineering, but her heart is in the past. Her series character, Faye Longchamp, lives the exciting life of an archaeologist, and Mary Anna envies her a little.Her novels have received recognitions including a spot on Voice of Young America's (VOYA) list of "Adult Mysteries with Young Adult Appeal." They have been on the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's (IMBA) bestseller list and have been designated Notable Books by Booksense and Indiebound. Mary Anna has won the Florida Historical Society's Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, and a Florida Book Awards Bronze Medal. Her books have been nominated for ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year and for the SIBA Book Award.

Faye Longchamp's growing list of adventures include Artifacts, Relics, Effigies, Findings, Floodgates and, coming in October, Strangers

Several other works of Mary Anna'a fiction are available as ebooks. Wounded Earth is an suspense novel featuring environmental scientist Larabeth McLeod. Several short stories and a story collection called Offerings are also available at smashwords, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo, and most other vendors of electronic media.

Mary Anna is a co-founder and board member of the Anhinga Writers' Studio. The Studio presents an annual summer workshop in Gainesville, Florida, providing writing instruction and networking for fiction and nonfiction authors of all levels of experience. For information on this year's summer workshop, visit www.anhingawriters.org.

For the incurably curious, Mary Anna's first published work, her master's thesis, was entitled A Modeling Study of the NH3-NO-O2 Reaction Under the Operating Conditions of a Fluidized Bed Combustor. Like her mysteries, it was a factual page-turner but, no, it's not available online. She turned from engineering to fiction after the birth of her third child, shifting her focus from managing hazardous wastes to preparing balanced meals. She has yet to acquire the knack of laundry management.

Mary Anna's interests include music, which has resulted in 7.5 feet of piano dominating her living room, and an arsenal of smaller musical instruments. Her interests in music and writing collided when she was asked to contribute a story and an original song for a book/CD anthology called A Merry Band of Murderers. She co-wrote and sang Land of the Flowers for that project. Click here to hear it.

While Mary Anna's novels are written with adults in mind, they have found an audience in schools, where they're being used to teach non-literature subjects such as social studies, math, and science. The social studies link was no surprise to the books' author, since her protagonist is an archaeologist, but she swears that she never once purposely included math or science in her stories. (And her readers have never once complained that the laws of physics operate properly in her books). Learning that she's done this unconsciously has been an inarguable example of the axiom that writers write about who they are. They can't help it.

Mary Anna is contracted, along with co-author Dr. Faith Wallace, to write a book for Pearson called Mathematical literacy in the Middle and Secondary Grades: Using 21st-century Resources to Spark Student Learning She is thrilled to have this opportunity to make a difference in the lives of young people. Math and science explain the world, so they're indispensable to any story set in that world. And they're very handy tools for an amateur detective to have. Invite Mary Anna to speak by telephone to your book group or class: E-mail Mary Anna.