Bruce D. Smith

Following a decades-long career of research and writing in archaeology, B.D. Smith started the Douglas Bateman and Anne Quinn mystery series as both a homage of sorts to the many Nordic noir crime novels he had read over the years, and as a welcome escape from the demands of fact-based scholarly writing. Sparsely populated central Maine, where Smith and his wife spend their summers, provides the landscape of woodlands, lakes, and small communities in which his stories unfold. While the bad guys in his books do horrible things, they are usually “from away,” and represent evil of one sort or another that threatens the way of life of local communities. In contrast to Smith’s fictional characters, the places he describes in his novels are all real, and accurately rendered, as are some aspects of daily life and local events, reflecting Smith’s deep affection for the region.