Three years ago, the Kansas Center for the Book and the State Library of Kansas joined together to form Kansas Reads, an initiative to get the whole state to read the same book.  Last year, Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood was the pick.  This year’s selection is by a Kansas author!  The Kansas Reads 2009 choice is Nancy Pickard’s The Virgin of Small Plains.

Ms. Pickard writes mostly mysteries and is the author of about sixteen novels, including the Jenny Cain and Marie Lightfoot mystery series.  She has also ventured into non-fiction as co-author with psychologist Lynn Lott of Seven Steps on the Writer’s Path.

She has won the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Shamus awards (the only author to have won all four) and is a three time Edgar Allen Poe nominee.

She is a founding member and former president of Sisters in Crime, the international organization dedicated to advancing women mystery writers and has previously served as a national board member of the Mystery Writers of America.

She graduated from the University of Missouri at Columbia with a degree in journalism and started writing in her mid-thirties after spending time working as a reporter, editor, and freelance writer.

Her novels have been published in over a dozen languages.

Her latest mystery, The Virgin of Small Plains, focuses on a crime that was committed seventeen years ago when a young woman is discovered in the snow during a blizzard in the Flint Hills of Kansas.  The town buries her in the local cemetery.  Since that time, strange miracles visit those who tend her grave.  The legend of the girl slowly spreads.

Julie Garwood, the New York Times bestselling author of Slow Burn has said that “[the book] will keep you up all night.  Nancy Pickard’s intelligent, suspenseful storytelling never disappoints.”

To celebrate Kansas Reads during the months of January and February, Ms. Pickard will be at Liberal Memorial Library on Monday, January 12, 2009 at 6:30 p.m. 

Stop by the library, check out her book, and join us in the New Year to welcome Ms. Pickard to southwest Kansas!!