Meet Beth Amos
Allow me to introduce myself. As you can see from this picture of me at the age of 6, I wasn’t the cutest child. That, combined with the fact that I was always the new kid because my family moved a lot due to my father’s job, made it hard for me to fit in. Consequently, I spent a lot of time on my own and books became some of my best friends.
It was my love of reading that led to my love of writing. I first indulged my writing passion, as do many young girls, by recording my deepest, darkest, and most secret thoughts in a diary. But it didn’t take long for my sisters to figure out where I hid it and how to pick the lock, so I quickly abandoned that project. Still, I was compelled to write. I dabbled with short stories and made quick enemies of many of my classmates when I got excited over theme assignments and essays. When I was seventeen I sent off my first short story. It was flung back to me with a kindly rejection letter at a speed previously unheard of in those days of snail mail. But I’m nothing if not stubborn and I simply tried again. And again. And again. Thus began what became a very extensive collection of rejection letters, all of which I still have today.
It didn’t take me long to realize that my dreams of supporting myself as a writer were about as flimsy as the lock on my diary, so I decided to pursue a career in nursing. At the age of 23, I had my son, Ryan. Somewhere in there I had a marriage or two, and a divorce or two (okay three, but who’s counting?) and I worked at advancing my career and raising my son. Between the demands of career and motherhood I had little time left over for writing, but I stuck with it nonetheless, using every spare second I could find to write, and working my way toward making it into the Guinness Book of Records as the person with the greatest number of rejections.
I never sold any of the hundreds of short stories I wrote. My very first published credit was a personal essay in a national magazine devoted to hospice care. My payment consisted of three copies of the magazine it appeared in. Still, it was my first and it’s framed and hanging on the wall of my home office. I eventually switched my focus from short fiction to novel length. And finally, at the age of 40, I sold my first novel, COLD WHITE FURY, to HarperCollins. Two more paranormal suspense novels followed with Harper. During that time I managed to develop a flourishing freelance business as a book reviewer for B&N.com, and as a medical writer for a number of different entities and periodicals. After a while, I realized I didn’t much like writing nonfiction because it made writing feel like work instead of fun, and it didn’t leave me much time or energy for writing fiction, which was what I truly loved to do. So after five years I gave up the freelance stuff, went back to nursing, and focused on my fiction.
My first agent, Linda Hayes, (a woman I adored!) retired during that time and after several years of hunting for a new agent (with a few missteps along the way), I self-published two other paranormal thrillers. In 2008 I had the good fortune to sign on with Jamie Brenner and Adam Chromy of Artists & Artisans. They quickly sold the manuscript for the first book in my humorous Mattie Winston Mysteries, which I titled THE VICARIOUS LIVER, to Kensington Books. The book was retitled as WORKING STIFF and I was also retitled with the pseudonym Annelise Ryan (it’s a long story as to why, one I’m happy to tell over a beer someday, but suffice to say I was working as an ER nurse by then and told people it was because I didn’t want my ER patients knowing I spent my spare time thinking up clever ways to kill people.) The series, featuring a wryly cynical nurse-turned-deputy coroner in a small Wisconsin town went on for 12 books and spawned a two-book spinoff series called the Helping Hands Mysteries.
In addition, I also wrote the six-book Mack’s Bar Mystery series that launched in 2013 under the pseudonym Allyson K. Abbott (another beer and another story) featuring bar owner and amateur crime solver, Mack Dalton, who uses a unique neurological disorder known as synesthesia to help figure out who and how-dunnit.
After twenty books with Kensington and a pause during the year of Covid, I started a new series with Berkley called the Monster Hunter Mysteries, featuring a cryptozoologist named Morgan Carter and her dog Newt. This dynamic duo investigate deaths that appear to be at the hands/teeth/claws of killer cryptids (or are they?) in Wisconsin. The first book, A DEATH IN DOOR COUNTY, came out in 2022, followed by DEATH IN THE DARK WOODS, BEAST OF THE NORTHWOODS, and MONSTER IN THE MOONLIGHT (pub date 1/27/26.) A fifth book in the series is currently in the works.
I’m retired now and not surprisingly, given my career choice, most of my novels have a medical flavor to them. In addition, I’ve dabbled in those areas of life that have always fascinated me—the weird, the macabre, and the unexplainable, such as paranormal powers, cryptids, and extraterrestrial life. And there’s always a touch of humor–sometimes more than a touch! So come along for the ride. I can promise you a good puzzle and a laugh or two, if not from my books then from that picture above, where, if you look closely enough, you’ll see pencil marks that fill in the places where chunks of my hair were missing after I gave myself a haircut. (And to Mom—those glasses … pink cateyes studded with rhinestones? What the hell were you thinking?)
