Bob Mayer

Bob Mayer is an American author and former U.S. Army Green Beret officer who writes military thrillers and, in a long-running collaborative partnership with romantic-comedy novelist Jennifer Crusie, comic mystery and romantic suspense. His solo work draws directly on his Special Forces background, favoring tight procedural detail and hard-edged action plotting. Mayer and Crusie began collaborating in the mid-2000s with Don't Look Down (2006), Agnes and the Hitman (2007), and Wild Ride (2010), pairing her rapid-fire comic dialogue and prickly heroines with his action instincts. That partnership deepened into the Liz Danger trilogy -- Lavender's Blue, Rest in Pink, and One in Vermillion (all 2023) -- a small-town comic mystery series, and continued into the Rocky Start books, all set in Burney, Ohio. Across the collaborations, Mayer's contribution is generally the procedural backbone -- investigations, tactical detail, and plot mechanics -- built to carry Crusie's dialogue and characters rather than compete with them. Beyond the Crusie partnership, Mayer has written extensively in military thriller and suspense series under his own name, drawing on both his service record and later work as an author-educator on craft and self-publishing.