Rhys Bowen

Rhys Bowen is the pen name of Janet Quin-Harkin. Rhys Bowen is the New York Times bestselling author of two historical mystery series as well as the #1 Kindle bestseller In Farleigh Field and the international bestsellers The Venice Sketchbook, The Victory Garden, Above the Bay of Angels, and The Tuscan Child.

Her Farleigh Field (2017) was nominated for the Edgar Award and won the Agatha Award for best historical mystery as well as the Macavity and Bruce Alexander Memorial Awards. 2021’s The Venice Sketchbook was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel of the Year. The Tuscan Child has sold over half a million copies to date.

Rhys Bowen was born in Bath, England, and educated at London University, but now divides her time between California and Arizona. Her books have been nominated for every major mystery award and she has won twenty of them to date. They have been translated into twenty-two languages, including Chinese and Arabic.

She currently writes two historical mystery series, each very different in tone. The Molly Murphy mysteries feature an Irish immigrant woman in turn-of-the-century New York City. These books are multi-layered, complex stories with a strong sense of time and place and have won many awards including Agatha and Anthony. There are 18 books so far in this series, plus three Kindle stories, The Amersham Rubies, Through the Window, and The Face in the Mirror—a great way to introduce new readers to Molly’s spunky personality.

Then there is Lady Georgie, Rhys’s latest, and very popular, heroine. She’s 35th in line to the throne of England, but she’s flat broke and struggling to survive in the Great Depression. These books are lighter and funnier than Molly’s adventures. They poke gentle fun at the British class system—about which Rhys knows a lot, having married into an upper-class family rather like Georgie’s, with cousins with silly nicknames, family ghosts, and stately homes. The sixteenth book in the series, Peril in Paris, was published in November 2022.

Three books in the series have won the Agatha Award for best historical mystery. The series received the Readers’ Choice Award for favorite mystery series, and Rhys was nominated for career achievement. It was also voted one of Goodreads’ top-10 cozy mysteries.

Her most recent achievement has been the big historical stand-alone novels, Above the Bay of Angels, In Farleigh Field, The Victory Garden, and The Tuscan Child. They have enjoyed impressive sales worldwide and brought Rhys many new readers. Her latest stand-alone, Where the Sky Begins, was published in 2022.

As a child, Rhys spent time with relatives in Wales. Those childhood experiences colored her first mystery series, about Constable Evans in the mountains of Snowdonia. She wrote ten books in the series, including the Edgar nominee Evan’s Gate. The Evan Evans series is being reissued in the U.K. by Joffe Books.

Rhys Bowen has lived in England, Germany, and Australia, but has called California her home for many years. She now escapes to a condo in Arizona during those cold California winters.

Photo: Douglas Sonders