Amanda Matetsky

From the author's website:Amanda Matetsky was a magazine editor and a volunteer literacy tutor before becoming a fiction writer. Her first novel, The Perfect Body, was published by HarperCollins in 1997 and won the NJRW Golden Leaf Award for Best First Book.Murderers Prefer Blondes, the first entry in Amanda’s popular Paige Turner mystery series, was published by Berkley Prime Crime in 2003 and was an IMBA bestseller. The second book in the series, Murder Is a Girl’s Best Friend (2004), also made the IMBA bestseller list. The third and fourth Paige Turner mysteries, How to Marry a Murderer (2005) and Murder on a Hot Tin Roof (2006), were released to rave reviews, as was the fifth and final novel in the series, Dial Me for Murder, which hit the bookstores in September 2008. Amanda is now working on a stand-alone novel, which she laughingly “categorizes” as a sexy romantic comedy mystery thriller. “I’m a confirmed genre writer,” she says, “but I can’t pick just one!”Amanda was born in Georgia, and as a result of her father’s many professional promotions and relocations, lived in seven other states (Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, California, and New York) before reaching the age of sixteen. She graduated from Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, New York, and earned her BA degree in English at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio.After college she moved to Taos, New Mexico, where she worked for the local newspaper, The Taos News, and developed a taste for salsa (the sauce and the music). One year later she returned to New York, took an apartment in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, and began her career as a magazine editor.While working at a large fan magazine publishing company, Amanda fell head over heels for her boss, Harry Matetsky. They eventually married, bought a house in a Long Island suburb, and continued working together in the magazine industry for twelve more years. The work was lucrative but not very satisfying, so they left the industry to pursue more personal interests. Harry is now a collector of old movie posters, original comic strip art, and comic books, while Amanda is living her lifelong dream of writing fiction. They reside in central New Jersey, with their two cats, Homer and Phoebe, in a house full of laughter and love and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.