Marty Ambrose Books in Order

If you want sunny Florida cozies: Peril in Paradise → Island Intrigue → Murder in the Mangroves → Killer Kool
If you want literary historical mystery: Claire's Last Secret → A Shadowed Fate → Forever Past
If you want short contemporary romance: Engaging → Life and Love → Heat Wave
If you want career-driven love stories: A Labor of Love → Racing to Love

Marty Ambrose was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in the kind of neighborhood that fed a writer's imagination. She has talked about watching the people around her and wondering what stories they were hiding, which tells you a lot about the way her fiction works. Long before publication, she was already turning ordinary life into little mysteries.

She wanted to be a poet first.

Her academic path followed that love of language. Ambrose began studying English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, then transferred to the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where she earned her BA in English in 1978. After that she went to the University of York in England for graduate study in English language and literature, digging deep into the British Romantics and writing on Lord Byron, a figure who would come back into her fiction years later.

The road to becoming a novelist was not especially neat or quick. She spent much of her professional life teaching English and creative writing in Florida, including more than three decades at Florida SouthWestern State College. Along the way she wrote poetry, taught literature, and kept building the habits of a working writer, even when publication still felt far off.

Then life pushed her to get serious.

Ambrose has said that a melanoma diagnosis when she was 30 made her rethink how long she could afford to wait. She started focusing more deliberately on craft, took workshops, wrote short mysteries for magazines, and published a run of contemporary romances. Books like Engaging, Life and Love, Heat Wave, A Labor of Love, and Racing to Love are shorter, brisker stories, but they already show what she likes: capable women, work problems, strong attraction, and people trying to build a life without losing themselves.

A move to Southwest Florida helped her find the setting that unlocked her mystery fiction. The local characters, island gossip, and close-knit routines reminded her of the curious undercurrents she had noticed growing up in St. Louis. Out of that came the Mango Bay mysteries, starting with Peril in Paradise. In Island Intrigue, Murder in the Mangroves, Killer Kool, and Coastal Corpse, reporter Mallie Monroe investigates crimes on fictional Coral Island, where small-town news, local politics, and personal entanglements are never far apart.

Then Ambrose took a turn that feels both surprising and completely natural. Drawing on her long interest in Romantic poetry and literary history, she wrote the Claire Clairmont trilogy: Claire's Last Secret, A Shadowed Fate, and Forever Past. Those novels move to 19th-century Italy and center on Claire Clairmont, Mary Shelley's stepsister and Lord Byron's former lover, as old secrets and buried grief rise back to the surface. For readers, they offer mystery, letters, memory, and a strong sense of place.

Italy clearly got under her skin. Ambrose traveled there on a college grant while researching the Claire books, and the streets, churches, villas, and shifting light of Florence and Ravenna became part of the stories. She has said that one of her goals is to make readers curious about the poets and literary women behind the novels, especially the ones history tends to push to the side.

Now based in Southwest Florida with her husband, Jim McLaughlin, Ambrose still writes with the same mix of curiosity, scholarship, and story instinct that shaped her from the start. Whether she is writing about Mallie Monroe chasing a killer through island chaos or Claire Clairmont chasing the truth through the wreckage of the Romantic era, she returns to the same question. What is really going on beneath the surface?