Annis Ward Jackson

Having written for various purposes such as curricula and other more technical creations, and having published only short stories and magazine articles, I took advantage of retirement to make a stab at writing in one of the genres that I've always loved, the murder mystery. My fascination for this genre goes back to my upbringing in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina.

Both my grandmothers and an elderly neighbor drew from a plethora of oft-told stories of ghosts and spirits and gruesome murders, including the infamous Tom Dooley /Laura Foster and the real Frankie and Charlie (popularized as Johnny)Silvers, both of which took place not too many miles from where I was born.

However, I allowed myself to be sidetracked from the murder mystery genre when I became fascinated with the age-old traditional lore that Abraham Lincoln was actually born in North Carolina. The result was a novel, Into The Twilight. By the time I had learned the ins and outs of the e-book world and was ready to publish the Lincoln book, I had completed a rough draft of Blind Malice, the first in my Rachel Myers series which is set in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina in the present day.

Since 2009 when the Lincoln book went live, I have published 13 books in the Myers series and have a new series with Ellis Crawford, a young man fresh out of the Marines, who takes a job as police chief in a small town in eastern North Carolina. This series begins in the late 1970's. There are 5 volumes to date in the Crawford series with more to come. Some of the Crawford series are based on actual events.

Gardening (perennials, hostas, herbs, and vegetables) and horses are an inescapable and vastly enjoyable part of my life so they figure prominently in my Rachel Myers series but less so in the Ellis Crawford.

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Besides the Rachel Myers and Ellis Crawford series, Jackson has published INTO THE TWILIGHT: The True Origins of Abe Lincoln; INTO THE DEEP; a novel set on Watauga Lake in eastern Tennessee, PRACTICAL GARDENING, a book of previously published articles, OPHELIA'S SATIRICAL DIADEM, a book on the sexual connotations of the herbs in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and PATCHWORK, which contains mostly previously published short stories and magazine articles about Appalachian culture.

After many years in distant places, Jackson now lives with her husband, horses, dogs, and gardens not far from where she grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina.