JE Barnard is a crime fiction author from Calgary, Canada. She has spent twenty-five years writing award-winning children's literature and short fiction. Barnard is well-known for her "Maddie Hatter Adventure" novels and "The Falls Mystery" series of novels. Her work has earned her several awards, including the Saskatchewan Writers Guild Award, the Bony Pete, and the Dundurn Unhanged Arthur. The second novel of the "Maddie Hatter" series, "Maddie Hatter and the Gilded Gauge," was recognized as the Alberta Book of the Year for Children and Youth. Barnard's novels have also been shortlisted for the UK Debut Dagger and twice for the Prix Aurora, and she has won the Great Canadian Story Prizes three times.
Barnard's first novella, 'Maddie Hatter and the Deadly Diamond,' was a finalist for the 2016 Prix Aurora. The second Maddie Hatter Adventure, 'Gilded Gauge,' was a finalist for the Prix Aurora and the 2018 Book of the Year for Alberta. 'When the Flood Falls,' the first novel in the Falls Mystery trilogy, won the Unhanged Arthur Ellis Award in 2016. Barnard has achieved bestseller lists seven times with six novels and divides her writing time between Calgary, AB, with her cat and Vancouver Island with a resident owl.
In her writing, Barnard creates suspenseful stories where women reclaim their power over partners, bosses, exes, or dangerous strangers. Her heroines, who are on their own journeys through life, save themselves and help other women and girls. In THE FALLS MYSTERIES, burnt-out ex-Mountie Lacey McCrae might still have nightmares about her abusive ex, but she doesn't hesitate to help her old university roommate when she is targeted by a midnight prowler or when her neighbor, who is ill with ME/CFS, needs a driver for an appointment. In The Maddie Hatter Adventures, the renegade daughter of a powerful British lord has rejected an arranged marriage and is forging her own path as an investigative journalist under cover of fashion reporting, along the way lending a hand to other young women as they attempt to seize control of their own lives. In life, as in her writing, Barnard supports services for women and children coping with the aftermath of violence and for the nearly 600,000 Canadians struck down by ME/CFS (and now Long Covid), and for all the people young to elderly who need trauma-informed care and support.