A writer who never dreamed of writing fiction? An avid reader all her life, an editor, reviewer, speech writer, Max Folsom never envisioned herself an author, a mystery writer.

“It was an impossible concept to me,” she says. “I couldn’t conceive of how an author would come up with a story and all its details, just as I couldn’t understand how a composer could hear the music and put it to paper. But one afternoon sitting in the back yard, the scene of private detective Baker Somerset finding the dead body at her office came to me full blown.” My husband said, “Write it down and see what happens.” The result was the searing novel ONE BAD DAY AFTER ANOTHER, in which her protagonist hunts the killer and becomes involved with the illegal machinations of the military arms and equipment industry,

She says, “Halfway through the book, I saw Somerset get a call from an insurance company regarding a search for a missing man about to be declared legally dead, and I knew he would be involved with trying to right the human rights violations surrounding the island of Diego Garcia and the U.S. base there.” That book became SEARCHING FOR PETER GRIFFITHS.

A member of Crime Writers of Canada, Sisters in Crime, and the League of Vermont Writers she writes a column in the quarterly Sherlockian journal GROANS, CRIES AND BLEATINGS, and was a finalist in both the 2018 Daphne Du Maurier Award for excellence in unpublished Mystery/Suspense, and the 2020 Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for Best Unpublished Crime Novel.

She is currently at work on her third Somerset novel, DEATH OF A CODEBREAKER.  Married to a retired Canadian Military Officer, and owner of a large orange striped cat, she divides her time between their Ottawa Centretown apartment, and a stone house in Vermont. She drives a burnt orange Mini Cooper with black racing stripes.