Furthermore, she does not believe that gender should matter in how a novel is received as long as the work is high quality. Having built her brand as Josh Lanyon for over two decades, she decided to just keep the name and even make it her legal DBA. She sent her manuscript to Gay Men’s Press and was surprised when it was instantly accepted, which told her it was more about the author than the story. She got 27 rejections with her real name before she changed to the male sounding name of Josh Lanyon. Moreover, being a woman many GLBT preferred titles written by gay men, as they believed these captured the essence of MM relationships. Back in 1996 when she started in MM it was not so easy to publish an MM novel, as mainstream was just not interested in those types of stories. She turned out to be quite good at mystery writing and sold an entire series to Penguin and Pocket Books, before she changed genre to write MM as Josh Lanyon. Music turned out to be harder than she thought it would be and hence she decided to focus only in writing. She sold her first work to Harlequin right after completing her college studies before she tried her hand in music.

Josh Lanyon has always wanted to be a writer ever since she was a child and started writing poetry when she was sixteen.

She currently lives in Southern California with her husband Kevin Burton Smith. She also made the shortlist for the Best Gay Mystery at the Lambda Literary Awards on four different instances, and is a four-time Eppie Award winner. Josh Lanyon was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award by Goodreads Favorite M/M Author awards. The Adrien English series got the All Time Favorite Male Male Couple Goodreads M/M Group Award. Her novel “Fatal Shadows” was the first foreign-authored title to make the Boy Love novelist in Japan in 2016. Her novellas include The Dangerous Ground series, The Doyle & Spain series, The Haunted Heart series, The I Spy series, The In A Dark Wood series, The Xoxo Files series, The Dark Horse series among other freestanding novellas and short stories.

Over the course of about seven years, she published her sixty titles in the Adrien English series, the Holmes & Moriarity Series, A Shot In the Dark series, The All’s Fair series, The Art of Murder series among several freestanding novels. Her debut novel was “Fair Game” an FBI thriller was published by the biggest Italian Romance Harlequin Mondadori. Her novels have been translated into more than ten languages. Her excellent fiction has once made her be referred to as the gay mystery Agatha Christie. Josh Lanyon is an American male/male fiction author that has written over sixty novels featuring unapologetic male on male romance, great adventure, and twisty mystery.

The Magician Murders by Josh Lanyon