Joan Hess

Joan Hess (1949-2017) was an American mystery writer best known for two long-running, distinctly comic cozy series. The Claire Malloy books follow a bookstore owner in the fictional college town of Farberville, Arkansas, who keeps stumbling into murders alongside running her shop and raising a teenage daughter; the series opened with Strangled Prose in 1986 and ran for decades. Her other major creation, the Maggody mysteries (sometimes called the Arly Hanks series), traded the bookshop for a tiny, gleefully eccentric fictional town in the Ozarks, where a former big-city police chief turned small-town constable navigates a cast of oddball locals with a sharper, more satirical edge than the typical cozy. Hess served as president of the American Crime Writers League and was a member of Sisters in Crime, and her work won the American Mystery Award. In this catalogue, Hess appears as the author who completed The Painted Queen, the twentieth and final Amelia Peabody novel, after series creator Elizabeth Peters (the pen name of Egyptologist Barbara Mertz) died in 2013 with the book largely drafted. Hess finished the manuscript from Peters' notes and outline, and it was published in 2017 — fittingly, the same year Hess herself died. Readers coming to her through that credit may want to explore her own Claire Malloy or Maggody books next, both of which share Peters' taste for wit and amateur sleuthing.