Bio

BIO

Rhys Bowen
Photo: Douglas Sonders

Short Bio:

Rhys Bowen is the New York Times bestselling author of more than forty novels, including The Victory Garden, The Tuscan Child, and the World War II-based In Farleigh Field, the winner of the Left Coast Crime Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel and the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel. 2021’s The Venice Sketchbook was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel of the Year. Bowen’s work has won over twenty honors to date, including multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Her books have been translated into many languages, and she has fans around the world, including over 70,000 Facebook followers. A transplanted Brit, Bowen divides her time between California and Arizona.

Long Bio:

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.

In Farleigh Field 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 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, now being co-written with her daughter Clare Broyles, 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 19 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 seventeenth book in the series, The Proof of the Pudding, was published in November 2023. 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, The Tuscan Child, and Where The Sky Begins. They have enjoyed impressive sales world-wide and brought Rhys many new readers. Her latest stand-alone, The Paris Assignment, was published in 2023.

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 currently being reissued in the U.K. by Joffe Books.

She 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. When she’s not writing, she loves to travel, sing, hike, paint, play the Celtic harp and spoil her grandchildren.