About

With one parent from Tuscaloosa, AL and the other from Argyle, NY, Julia Spencer-Fleming likes to think of herself multi-geographical. A former military brat, she grew up in places as diverse as Montgomery, Rome, Stuttgart and Syracuse. A graduate of Ithaca College, George Washington University and the U Maine School of Law, she took up writing while still a stay-at-home mother of two.

During the time it took to finish her first book, she got a full-time job at a Portland, Maine, law firm and had a third child. Julia didn’t want to write yet another lawyer-sleuth, so she used her army past and a keen eye for the goings-on at her Episcopal church to create Clare Fergusson, first female priest in the small Adirondack town of Millers Kill.

The result, In the Bleak Midwinter, made debut history when it won the St. Martin’s/Malice Domestic contest, the Dilys Award from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, and the Agatha, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards for Best First Novel.  Its sequel, A Fountain Filled With Blood, was a Borders Original Voices selection. The third book in her series, Out of the Deep I Cry, was a finalist for both the Edgar® award and the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice award and was nominated for an Anthony Award for Best Mystery of 2004. Its follow-up, To Darkness and to Death was a BookSense Notable Book. The fifth book in her series, All Mortal Flesh, was nominated for the Anthony, Agatha, Macavity and Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Awards and won the Nero Wolfe and the Gumshoe. Its sequel, I Shall Not Want, was another Agatha Award nominee, and the next, One Was A Soldier, received nominations for the Anthony and Agatha Awards and became a New York Times bestseller.

The eighth Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne mystery, Through The Evil Days, was a USA Today bestseller and was nominated for an Agatha Award. Her most recent book, Hid From Our Eyes, also made the USA Today bestseller list. The tenth in the series, At Midnight Comes the Cry, was released November 2025. 

Julia, who was widowed in 2017, keeps up with her adult children’s travels from her 200 year old farmhouse in the Maine countryside. She keeps fit by walking her two Shih Tzus, swimming in the Saco River, and stacking two cords of wood every autumn. She thanks her readers for ensuring she hasn’t had to practice law in twenty years.