about marian
Marian McCarthy is a novelist with a long career as a freelancer, corporate communications consultant, technical copywriter, columnist, ghostwriter, editor, and writing teacher.
Murder and the Mortician is the first in the Last Responder mystery series, featuring psychic mortician Perrie Spock. When she discovers the body of a young woman on the driveway of her funeral home, Perrie begins to hear stories only the dead can tell. It’s “The Medium” meets “Six Feet Under.”
Beneath the Wild Blue, her debut novel, is based on her experience as a mid-century military brat, part of a vagabond family that traveled the world and never clung to one place. She is an award-winning short story writer, independent thinker, rabble rouser, and two-time cancer survivor. Marian lives with her husband Jim in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is the fiercely loving dragon mother of two daughters, Madeleine and Caitlin.
my story
As a middle child and a military brat, I grew up as a keen observer of my surroundings, always aware of the conflicts, concerns, and risks in every situation. I was the kind of kid who waited for just the right moment to leap into the whirring jump rope at recess, fully aware that a split second could mean the difference between falling on my face or skipping lightly into the rhythm of the game. My fiercely loving mother and father taught me to learn from every failure, to get up from every fall.
In college, I majored in journalism, choosing to channel my love of language and debate into some sort of editorial genius. It didn’t happen. I paid the bills by writing corporate policies and procedures, technical manuals for analog computers, press releases, magazine articles, and ad copy.
But I was lucky in love. I married my college sweetheart and built a life with him. A decade into our marriage, we brought two daughters into the world. I became their full-time caregiver, and that’s when my creative life began. Reading with them, I began to understand the power of stories, and I longed to create them. Through my primal love for my family, I found my true calling as a fiction writer.
I wrote some award-winning short stories and progressed into novels, writing four for practice before I published Beneath the Wild Blue. Murder and the Mortician, the first in my cozy mystery series, will be out September 22, 2021—which also happens to be Mabon, or the Autumnal Equinox.
Readers are the reason I write. Thank you for reading. I look forward to hearing from you!