About

I write crime fiction, historical novels, and Jane Austen pastiches. I’m the former president of the Northern California Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America.

My historical crime-fiction series, Fog City Noir, is set in 1930 San Francisco and published by Level Best Books. The bridges haven’t been built, the stock market has crashed, and crime doesn’t sleep. The first book in this series, Fog City, was nominated for a 2025 Shamus Award for Best First P.I. novel from the P.I. Writers of America and won the 2025 Macavity Award for Best Historical Mystery. The second book in the series, City Lights, was nominated for the 2026 Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery. The third book in the series, The Crookedest Street in the World, will be published in June 2026.

The passion and frenzied pace characterizing the food scene in the 1980s are well documented in Ms. Johnson's first novel, Beat Until Stiff, which was nominated for an Agatha for Best First Novel and a Booksense pick. The second novel in this series, Roux Morgue, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. In addition, she has written a YA thriller set in a suburb of California where privilege meets murder, titled Swim Town, and two Austen pastiches: Pen and Prejudice and Resolution, which are modern adaptations of the original novels Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, respectively.

On June 30, 2026, Level Best Books will publish my fictional account of Pauline Pfeiffer’s marriage to Ernest Hemingway. We meet all the major players of the expat world of 1920s Paris. For Thee is a first-person fictional narrative of the marriage of Pauline Pfeiffer and Ernest Hemingway. It is historically factual and includes character sketches of all the well-known players of the 1920s Paris expat set. We follow Pauline from the cotton fields of Arkansas to post-World War I Paris, where she meets Ernest Hemingway. Once they are married, they ostensibly settle in Key West, but, in reality, they never stop moving. They follow the bullfights in Spain, shoot game in the mountains of Idaho and Wyoming, hunt for big game in Africa, and troll the waters of Cuba to reel in marlin. A devout Catholic when she meets Ernest, Pauline willfully sins against the tenets of her upbringing and abandons her God, all for a man who meets a long-legged blonde in a bar, and will edit her out of his life with the same casual disdain he’d normally reserve for a badly written sentence.