Laura Ellen Scott is a novelist whose titles with Pandamoon Publishing include The Juliet and The Mean Bone in Her Body, the first book in her New Royal Mysteries series. Scott was named after the classic noir film and song, Laura, so it’s no surprise that she has always been drawn to dark themes and quirky characters, and her bizarre, complex stories have prompted comparisons to the work of Tom Robbins, Kelly Link, and Robert Altman. Her early short stories appeared in places like Ploughshares, Pank, Mississippi Review, and Wigleaf, but it wasn’t until she received an out-of-the-blue email from the great Dorothy Allison, the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, that she started writing novels. That email said, among other things: “Damn you are good. You are just seriously satisfyingly good.” Eventually Allison would blurb Laura’s first novel, Death Wishing, a comic fantasy set in post-Katrina New Orleans, where dying wishes are starting to come true.

 

Her second novel is The Juliet, a western thriller that traces the 100-year history of a cursed emerald culminating in a search for it in Death Valley during the great wildflower bloom of 2005. The Mean Bone in Her Body is the first book in a series set in a fictional college/prison town in Ohio, where a liberal arts college joins forces with the corrections industry to offer a unique crime writing program.

 

Born and raised in Northern Ohio, Laura now lives in Fairfax, Virginia, where she teaches creative writing at George Mason University.