The Mimico home of award-winning novelist Elizabeth J. Duncan backs on to a beautiful view of Lake Ontario and there’s no place that the writer loves more than being here.

“This is a great area to live and walk around,” Duncan says. “My family live here and I have a home here. The people are like family.”

Duncan, who lives near Royal York Rd. and Lake Shore Blvd. W., is the author of 13 mystery novels; which includes 10 brisk-selling Penny Brannigan thrillers and three Shakespeare in the Catskills mysteries.

The so-called “comfy mystery” series follows expat Canadian Penny Brannigan, who lives in North Wales running the village spa by day and solving murders by night.

This month she is releasing in North Wales her tenth Penny Brannigan who-done-it called “Remembering the Dead.”

“I now live in North Wales five months out of the year working on the series,” she admits. “I am always glad when I come back home.”

The former Humber College professor has won a Bloody Words Best Light Mystery Award and was a finalist for the Agatha and Arthur Ellis Awards. She has a U.S. publisher and most of her novels are sold south of the border “where there is quite a Penny Brannigan following.”

“People always tell me that they want to go to North Wales after they read one of my books,” she says. “That is what all writers want to hear.”

The former journalist has worked for the Ottawa Citizen, Hamilton Spectator and the CBC before she began writing books. She lived in London, England, for five years, while covering stories for the CBC.
Duncan also worked in public relations and is a faculty member of the Humber School for Writers.

She is first Canadian writer to win the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition. The Cold Light of Mourning, her first novel, is also the winner of the William F. Deeck-Malice Domestic Grant and was shortlisted for an Agatha and an Arthur Ellis Award.

In her latest, Brannigan attends a dinner party at a posh country house where a historic chair disappears and a waiter is murdered.

The book is “for those who love comfy mysteries,” says Alan Bradley, a New York Times bestselling author of the Flavia de Luce mysteries.

Duncan is available for talks on books and her titles can be obtained at elizabethjduncan.com