Meet Ann Audrey Pickering.
Atlanta attorney. Reluctant sleuth. Excellent at spotting a motive hiding behind good manners.
Discover Winnie Simpson's Ann Audrey Mysteries, where society, scandal, family, and murder make a very dangerous cocktail.
Ann Audrey Pickering did not set out to become a murder magnet. She is a lawyer, after all - trained for evidence, arguments, and people who insist they are telling the truth.
But in Winnie Simpson's Ann Audrey Mysteries, the facts have a way of slipping out from behind polite smiles, social ambition, family complications, and the occasional very inconvenient corpse.
Sharp-Eyed Mysteries
With Southern Bite.
Ann Audrey Pickering is smart enough to know when a story does not add up and stubborn enough to keep asking questions after everyone else would prefer she stop.
She brings a lawyer's eye, a friend's loyalty, and a sharp sense of the absurd to mysteries where charm can be camouflage and manners can be motive.
Who really killed the married man her best friend was having an affair with?
In booming late-1990s Atlanta, former attorney Ann Audrey Pickering has retreated from public life after helping the FBI prosecute her ex-husband. Her quiet existence is shattered when her best friend, Theo Humphries, becomes the prime suspect in the murder of his lover—a wealthy real estate developer with powerful friends and dangerous secrets.
Determined to clear Theo’s name, Ann Audrey follows a trail from Atlanta’s elite neighborhoods to Georgia’s coast, uncovering a decades-old secret buried since the Vietnam War. Along the way, she finds herself drawn to the arrogant but compelling Lieutenant Mike Bristol. As the investigation closes in on a killer, Ann Audrey must confront both a deadly adversary and a choice that will test her deepest principles.
In Atlanta's high society, murder is the ultimate power move. Can Ann Audrey crack the case?
When a beautiful Atlanta woman is widowed twice under suspicious circumstances, Ann Audrey Pickering is pulled into a case she never wanted.
A former lawyer who helped the FBI convict her own husband for fraud, Ann Audrey agrees to investigate at the request of her friend Flynn Reynolds, whose family suspects a charming widow may be hiding deadly secrets. Set in Atlanta during the run-up to the 2000 Super Bowl, the search leads through the city’s bars, private clubs, and social circles, uncovering a tangled story of ambition, marriage, and murder. As an ice storm brings Atlanta to a standstill, a killer finally has nowhere left to hide.
Peek into Ann Audrey's World . . .
Winnie Simpson blends legal insight, social wit, and a lifelong affection for classic mystery storytelling.
Following her mother's lead, Mississippi native Winnie Simpson fell in love with mysteries in the third grade, beginning with Nancy Drew before graduating to the great British, American, and international masters of crime fiction.
After studying music at Duke University and earning an MFA from SUNY Buffalo, Winnie pursued a successful legal career instead of a musical one. She graduated from Emory University School of Law, became a partner at one of Atlanta's largest law firms, and later taught litigation at Emory Law School before retiring to write full-time.
Her first manuscript, still unpublished, was inspired by an extraordinary true Atlanta murder trial during the polio epidemic, in which brothers faced one another as prosecutor and defense attorney. That fascination with the intersection of law, family, and human nature continues in the Ann Audrey Mystery series.
Set against the backdrop of Atlanta's old and new South, Winnie's novels explore the hidden power of Southern women—what Rosalynn Carter memorably described as "whipped cream over piano wire"—along with the ambitions, social climbing, and carefully guarded secrets that can turn privilege into motive.
Winnie lives in Northern Michigan in a renovated nineteenth-century building that once served as the Michigan State Asylum, an address her friends consider entirely fitting for a mystery writer. She enjoys opera, hiking, cycling, Duke basketball (most seasons), and is at work on the next Ann Audrey Mystery.
