Julie Smith

Julie Smith is an American mystery novelist best known for two long-running series set in cities she has called home: the San Francisco-based Rebecca Schwartz mysteries, featuring a feminist defense attorney, and the New Orleans-set Skip Langdon series, following a police detective navigating the city's distinctive culture and politics. The second book in the Langdon series, New Orleans Mourning (1990), won the Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, a major recognition in the crime-fiction field. Smith also wrote a shorter series under the pen name Cindy Blake and served as the first female president of the Mystery Writers of America national organization, a role that placed her at the center of the genre's professional community during the 1990s. A former newspaper reporter, she worked for the San Francisco Chronicle before turning to fiction full-time, and her novels are noted for grounding procedural plotting in closely observed regional detail, particularly New Orleans' neighborhoods and social rhythms. In this catalogue, Smith appears as one of thirteen authors who each contributed a chapter to I'd Kill For That (2004), a collaborative relay novel written as a breast-cancer research fundraiser.