Novel Suspects presents our annual Women in Crime Fiction event, featuring three guest speakers and our moderator, Jess Zaffaris. 

Ashley Winstead is the author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, The Last Housewife, Midnight is the Darkest Hour, Fool Me Once, and The Boyfriend Candidate. Her books have been Library Read picks, Loan Star picks, Best of Amazon picks, and Best of Apple Books picks, and have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, and Library Journal.

Freida McFadden is a New York Times, #1 Amazon, USA TODAY, Wall Street Journal, and Publisher's Weekly bestselling author Freida McFadden is a practicing physician specializing in brain injury who has penned multiple bestselling psychological thrillers and medical humor novels. Freida’s work has been selected as one of Amazon Editors’ best books of the year and she is the winner of the International Thriller Writers Award for best paperback. Her novels have been translated into over 30 languages.

Mia P. Manansala (MAH-nahn-sah-lah; listen to pronunciation here) (she/her) is a writer and book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture.

Jess Zafarris is the author of Once Upon a Word: A Word-Origin Dictionary for Kids. She is also an award-winning innovator of digital content and marketing solutions and a prolific online and print journalist, having served as the Executive Director of Marketing & Communications for Gotham Ghostwriters. Before that, she served as Content Strategist and Digital Content

Director for Writer’s Digest and Script, and she still occasionally writes for WD.

Women in Crime Fiction Panel