June 6, 7 PM ET

The Authors

A native of Chicago’s South Side, Nancy Johnson worked for more than a decade as an Emmy-nominated, award-winning television journalist at CBS and ABC affiliates in markets nationwide.

Her debut novel, The Kindest Lie, has been reviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and is featured on Entertainment Weekly’s Must List. It’s been named one of the most anticipated books of 2021 by Newsweek, O, the Oprah Magazine, Shondaland, NBC News, Marie Claire, ELLE, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, Good Housekeeping, Parade, Refinery29, and more. Booksellers nationwide selected her novel as an Indie Next pick and librarians chose it for LibraryReads. Nancy’s work has been published in Real Simple and O, The Oprah Magazine, and has received support from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, Tin House, and Kimbilio Fiction.

A graduate of Northwestern University and The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Nancy lives in downtown Chicago and manages brand communications for a large health care nonprofit. The Kindest Lie is her first novel. Visit her website at nancyjohnson.net.

With more than two million copies of her books sold worldwide, number one bestseller Clare Mackintosh is the multi-award-winning author of I Let You Go, which was a Sunday Times bestseller and the fastest-selling title by a new crime writer in 2015. It also won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2016.

Both Clare’s second and third novels, I See You and Let Me Lie, were number one Sunday Times bestsellers. All three of her books were selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club. Clare’s latest novel, After the End, was published in June 2019 and spent seven weeks in the Sunday Times hardback bestseller chart.

Clare’s latest thriller, Hostage, will be published in June 2021.

Together, Clare’s books have been published in more than forty countries. Clare is patron of the Silver Star Society, a charity based at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford, which supports parents experiencing high-risk or difficult pregnancies. She lives in North Wales with her husband and their three children. Learn more at claremackintosh.com.

Jess Montgomery is the author of the Kinship Historical Mystery series (Minotaur Books), inspired by a true-life 1920s female sheriff in Appalachia. Under Jess’s given name, she is a regular columnist for Writer’s Digest, “Level Up Your Writing (Life),” and was a weekly freelance columnist for twenty years for the Dayton Daily News, first writing humor, and then columns about the literary life of her native Dayton, Ohio.

Her first novel in the Kinship Historical Mystery series, The Widows, won the Readers’ Choice in Fiction for the 2019 Ohioana Awards. Jess is a three-time recipient of the Individual Excellence Award in Literary Arts from the Ohio Arts Council, and has been a John E. Nance Writer in Residence at Thurber House (Columbus, Ohio). She lives in her native Ohio, and in addition to writing, loves spending time with family and friends, reading, crocheting, baking (especially pies), spoiling her cats and houseplants, hiking and occasionally fishing. Learn more at jessmontgomeryauthor.com.

Aggie Blum Thompson worked as a newspaper reporter, covering cops, courts, and trials, with a healthy dose of the mundane mixed in. Her writing has appeared in newspapers such as The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

A native New Yorker, she now lives just over the Washington D.C. line in Bethesda, Maryland with her husband, two children, cat, and dog.

I Don’t Forgive You is Aggie’s first novel. Learn more at aggieblumthompson.com.

Your Hosts

Hank Phillippi Ryan is the USA Today bestselling author of thirteen novels of suspense.  She has won five Agathas, four Anthonys, two Macavitys, the Daphne, and the coveted Mary Higgins Clark award. National reviews have called her a “master at crafting suspenseful mysteries” and “a superb and gifted storyteller.” Her 2019 book The Murder List won the Anthony Award for Best Novel of the year. Her 2020 book is The First to Lie, of which the Publishers Weekly starred review said, “Stellar. Ryan could win a sixth Agatha with this one.” It is now a nominee for the Mary Higgins Clark Award.

Hank is also an award-winning investigative reporter at Boston’s WHDH-TV. In addition to 37 EMMYs and 14 Edward R. Murrow awards, Hank’s won dozens of other honors for her ground-breaking journalism. Hank is a founding teacher at Mystery Writers of America University and served as past president of national Sisters in Crime. Her upcoming novel, Her Perfect Life, will be published September 14, 2021. Learn more at www.HankPhillippiRyan.com.

Authors’ Books

The Kindest Lie by Nancy Johnson

It’s 2008, and the inauguration of President Barack Obama ushers in a new kind of hope. In Chicago, Ruth Tuttle, an Ivy-League educated Black engineer, is married to a kind and successful man. He’s eager to start a family, but Ruth is uncertain. She has never gotten over the baby she gave birth to—and was forced to leave behind—when she was a teenager. She had promised her family she’d never look back, but Ruth knows that to move forward, she must make peace with the past.

Returning home, Ruth discovers the Indiana factory town of her youth is plagued by unemployment, racism, and despair. As she begins digging into the past, she unexpectedly befriends Midnight, a young white boy who is also adrift and looking for connection. Just as Ruth is about to uncover a burning secret her family desperately wants to keep hidden, a traumatic incident strains the town’s already searing racial tensions, sending Ruth and Midnight on a collision course that could upend both their lives.

Purchase The Kindest Lie at an independent bookstore near you.

Purchase The Kindest Lie online at www.bookshop.org.

Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

Mina is trying to focus on her job as a flight attendant, not the problems with her five-year-old daughter back home, or the fissures in her marriage. But the plane has barely taken off when Mina receives a chilling note from an anonymous passenger, someone intent on ensuring the plane never reaches its destination: The following instructions will save your daughter’s life…

Someone needs Mina’s assistance and knows exactly how to make her comply.

When one passenger is killed and then another, Mina knows she must act. But which lives does she save: Her passengers…or her own daughter and husband who are in grave distress back at home?

Purchase Hostage at an independent bookstore near you.

Purchase Hostage online at www.bookshop.org.

The Stills by Jess Mongtomery

Ohio, 1927: Moonshining is a way of life in rural Bronwyn County, and even the otherwise upstanding Sheriff Lily Ross has been known to turn a blind eye when it comes to stills in the area. But when thirteen-year-old Zebediah Harkins almost dies after drinking tainted moonshine, Lily knows that someone has gone too far, and—with the help of organizer and moonshiner Marvena Whitcomb—is determined to find out who.

But then, Lily’s nemesis, the businessman George Vogel, reappears in town with his new wife, Fiona. Along with them is also her former brother-in-law Luther Ross, now an agent for the newly formed Bureau of Prohibition. To Lily, it seems too much of a coincidence that they should arrive now.

As fall turns to winter, a blizzard closes in. Lily starts to peel back the layers of deception shrouding the town of Kinship, but soon she discovers that many around her seem to be betraying those they hold dear—and that Fiona too may have an agenda of her own.

Purchase The Stills at an independent bookstore near you.

Purchase The Stills online at www.bookshop.org.

The Wicked Sister by Karen Dionne

From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Marsh King’s Daughter comes a startling novel of psychological suspense as two generations of sisters try to unravel their tangled relationships between nature and nurture, guilt and betrayal, love and evil.

You have been cut off from society for fifteen years, shut away in a mental hospital in self-imposed exile as punishment for the terrible thing you did when you were a child.

But what if nothing about your past is as it seems? And if you didn’t accidentally shoot and kill your mother, then whoever did is still out there. Waiting for you.

Purchase The Wicked Sister at an independent bookstore near you.

Purchase The Wicked Sister online at www.bookshop.org.

The First to Lie by Hank Phillippi Ryan

We all have our reasons for being who we are―but what if being someone else could get you what you want? After a devastating betrayal, a young woman sets off on an obsessive path to justice, no matter what dark family secrets are revealed.

What she doesn’t know―she isn’t the only one plotting revenge. An affluent daughter of privilege. A glamorous manipulative wannabe. A determined reporter, in too deep. A grieving widow who has to choose her new reality. Who will be the first to lie? And when the stakes are life and death, do a few lies really matter?

Purchase The First to Lie at an independent bookstore near you.

Purchase The First to Lie online at www.bookshop.org.