Cleveland Author Amanda Flower Puts a Comforting Spin on Crime and Mystery Novels

Amanda Flower quips about always keeping a book in her purse. She’s also taken up audiobooks for when she’s doing chores around her home farm in Tallmadge. The full-time author’s capacity for leisure reading is slim but valuable. While she’s writing a few books a year, and publishing a handful more behind the scenes, it’s a welcome break from her own characters and plotlines.

“I’m constantly writing,” Flower says. “I always know that I have another book to do. So you need to be inspired, because this is your job. And I work really well under pressure when a deadline is close. That’s probably when I write my best stuff.”

The prolific mystery author has maintained a steady relationship with presses like Kensington Cozies and Sourcebooks’ Poisoned Pen Press. Her intriguing imagination and unique passion have fueled a decade defined by 57 titles — and counting.

Before the days of a couple books in her bag, the Akron native grew up spending her summers lost in nearly 100 novels and entering local high school writing contests. She started drafting her first novel in college, then worked as a librarian before going full-time as an author.

Flower's final publication of 2025, Newlyweds Can Be Knocked Off, follows a murder mystery in the sunny Amish community of Pinecraft, Florida. Earlier this year, Natural Barn Killer uncovered dark secrets in the farm town of Cherry Glen. The recent Caturday Crime frames a group of cats as the only witnesses to a murder, and a forthcoming novel, Truffle Trouble, revives one her long-loved characters, Jethro the pig, for a chocolatier’s tragic summer wedding.

It seems extravagant, but Flower’s world-building isn’t far-fetched. Much of it comes from meshing her love for mystery novels with her own personal experiences of working at a library in Amish country (and sampling pie around Holmes County for “research”), living on a farm and housing 19 rescue cats. Often, cracking the case is the complicated part.

“I am a ‘pantser’ in the world of writing,” Flower explains, “someone that writes by the seat of their pants. So I don’t really know the killer until I get to the end. I may change my mind halfway through, thinking I know who it’s going to be. I’m always kind of surprised, myself.”

“There’s always a kind-of happy ending,” she adds. “Obviously, someone was murdered. But justice is served in the end, and you don’t always get that in the real world. That’s what I love about mystery novels. The right things are gonna happen, and wrongs are gonna be corrected.”

She’s seen her own sort of justice for her work: self-publishing her Cat Rescue Mysteries to funnel profits toward nursing her fleet of rescue cats, snagging recognition as a USA Today bestseller for her Amish Quilt Shop Mysteries series and winning three Agatha Awards — which are selected in honor of renowned mystery author Agatha Christie, one of Flower’s biggest influences.

Flower’s Agatha Award-winning series include her children’s Andi Boggs series, as well as her first dive into historical fiction, An Emily Dickinson Mystery series. The three-book collection launched in 2022 with Flower’s personal favorite of her novels, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, which turned the historic poet into a detective. In addition to earning an Agatha Award, the novel was also displayed at Dickinson’s homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts.

“It’s kind of the book that changed the trajectory of my career,” Flower says.

She’s also developing other historical mystery series centered around Nellie, the daughter of former President Ulysses S. Grant, and the Wright brothers’ sister, Katharine.

“I still love writing the humorous cozy mysteries, but I never want to rest on my laurels,” Flower says. “I’m really inspired by these women’s lives. I want to challenge myself, and I can also feel like I’m creating more serious work, too.”

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