Bios

Aaron Elkins is the creator of the modern forensic mystery, having pioneered the genre in 1982 with Fellowship of Fear, which introduced the Skeleton Detective, Gideon Oliver—still going strong in 2011, after sixteen books. Among his awards are a best-novel Edgar and a Nero Wolfe Award.  He and his wife Charlotte hold a jointly awarded Agatha.   Aaron's books have been translated into a major ABC-TV series and have been selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Literary Guild, and the Readers Digest Condensed Mystery Series. In addition, his work has been published in over a dozen languages.

In addition to his forensic novels, Aaron has a second series featuring art curator-sleuth Chris Norgren, and he and Charlotte have collaborated on five mysteries with female golfer Lee Ofsted. In addition Aaron is the author of Loot, a massively researched, critically acclaimed novel dealing with the modern-day consequences of Nazi art plunder, and Turncoat, which explores a similar subject.

Aaron speaks often at professional conferences, has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times' travel magazine, has written for Smithsonian magazine, and is the author of several short stories and numerous articles on the craft of writing.

Aaron and Charlotte live on Washington's Olympic Peninsula.   He keeps his hand in the forensic game by serving as the forensic anthropologist for the Clallam County Cold Case Task Force.

When Charlotte Elkins was working as an art librarian at the MH de Young Museum in San Francisco, she tried her hand at writing a romance. To her mild surprise, it was accepted by a major publisher. Then, when her grant-funded position at the museum ended, she went on to write five mass-market romance novels for Mills & Boone/Harlequin under the pseudonym of Emily Spenser. They were translated and sold in more than twenty countries. But soon she found that collaborating with her husband on mysteries was more fun, and A Wicked Slice was published in 1989. They were encouraged when Publishers Weekly called it “An engagingly humorous thriller." In between writing four more Lee Ofsteds, they wrote short stories, one of which, “Nice Gorilla, won the Agatha Award for best short story of the year in 1992. Recently the Japanese publishing house, Shueisha, bought all of the Lee Ofsted novels and will be publishing them in Japan over the next several years. Currently, Charlotte is working (with Aaron) on a new mystery series, one that takes her back to her roots in the art world.