Simone St. James

Simone St. James is a Canadian author of gothic and supernatural suspense who lives outside Toronto. Before writing full-time, she spent twenty years working behind the scenes in television; she has said she wrote her first ghost story, about a haunted library, in high school, and returned to the idea as an adult wanting to write "a ghost story that was creepy but not gory, and that had a romance in it." That premise became her 2012 debut novel, The Haunting of Maddy Clare, which won two RITA Awards from Romance Writers of America (Best First Book and Best Novel with Strong Romantic Elements) and an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada for Best First Crime Novel -- a striking critical reception that placed her at the intersection of romance, mystery, and horror from the start.

St. James writes standalone novels rather than a continuing series, typically pairing a historical or cold-case mystery with a haunting and a slow-burn romance. The Broken Girls (2018), The Sun Down Motel (2020) and The Book of Cold Cases (2022) were all New York Times and USA Today bestsellers, with several of her later books sharing the fictional town of Fell, New York, as a loose backdrop. Her most recent novel, A Box Full of Darkness, was published in January 2026.