Marcia Talley

Marcia Talley is an American mystery writer best known for the Hannah Ives series, which follows a Maryland breast-cancer survivor who becomes an amateur sleuth after taking early retirement -- a premise Talley developed in part from her own experience with the disease. The first book, Sing It to Her Bones (1999), won the Malice Domestic Best First Novel contest and went on to earn Agatha and Anthony award nominations, launching a series that has run to more than a dozen entries. Before writing fiction full-time, Talley worked as a librarian and in information-technology management for the U.S. Navy, and she has lived for extended periods aboard a sailboat, experience that surfaces in the series' Chesapeake Bay settings. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime, the advocacy organization for women in crime writing, and has edited and contributed to several serial round-robin mystery anthologies in addition to writing her own novels. In this catalogue, Talley appears as one of thirteen authors who each wrote a chapter of I'd Kill For That (2004), a collaborative relay novel produced as a breast-cancer research fundraiser -- a project whose theme closely mirrors the cancer-survivor premise of her own Hannah Ives books.