We are happy to announce that Katherine Hall Page will be awarded this year's CrimeMaster Award and will talk about her long and accomplished career at the Maine Crime Wave on June 11. Katherine's first mystery, The Body in the Belfry, was the 1991 Agatha Award winner for Best First Mystery Novel. The fifteenth book in the series, The Body in the Snowdrift , won the 2006 Agatha Award for Best Mystery Novel. She also awarded the 2001 Agatha for Best Short Story and has been a nominee or finalist for an Edgar and multiple Agathas, Maine Literary Awards, and Mary Higgins Clark Awards. Katherine also received the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from Malice Domestic. The Body in the Wake is her most recent book, and William Morrow will publish the 26th in Katherine’s Faith Fairchild series, The Body in the Web, in 2023.

Before her career as a full-time writer, Katherine taught at the high school level for many years. Married for forty-six years to Professor Alan Hein, an experimental psychologist at MIT, Katherine and Alan have a son. It was during her husband's sabbatical year in France after the birth of their son that Katherine wrote her first mystery.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Harlan Coben notes, “Katherine Hall Page is my favorite writer of the traditional mystery." And writing about The Body in the Wake in the New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio observes, “Katherine Hall Page’s latest Faith Fairchild mystery (the 25th in a long-running series) sends her beloved amateur sleuth on a rare solo vacation to the family’s summer cottage in Maine. Her minister husband, Tom, is fine, as are their two grown children, so series fans need not worry. Faith, a professional caterer, plans to relax and help a bit in the kitchen of a friend whose daughter is getting married. (There’s a recipe for old-fashioned blueberry buckle at the back of the book that seems easy to make and sounds delicious — except you really need wild Maine blueberries, which are hellish to gather.)”

Barbara Ross is the author of the Maine Clambake Mysteries and the Jane Darrowfield Mysteries. Her books have been nominated for multiple Agatha Awards for Best Contemporary Novel and have won the Maine Literary Award for Crime Fiction. Barbara’s Maine Clambake novellas are included along with stories by Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis in holiday anthologies from Kensington Publishing. Barbara and her husband live in Portland.

CrimeMaster and Keynote