Maggie Lyons

Michael Llewellyn is the author of 22 books of historical fiction, true crime, mystery, time travel, humor and nonfiction travel. A native of Fountain City, Tennessee, he lived in New York's Greenwich Village 20 years, working as an advertising copywriter by day and writing novels on weekends. In the '70s he published four historical romances under the name Maggie Lyons before relocating to the French Quarter which produced a travel book, Edge Guide: New Orleans, and Twelfth Night, (1997) a historical novel about the dark side of 1857 Creole society and the exotic caste system of the free people of color. The New Orleans Times-Picayune called it "the gilded bean in your carnival king cake." His novel, Creole Son, focused on French painter Edgar Degas’s turbulent 1872 visit to New Orleans which deeply impacted his artistic style. The (Louisiana) Advocate’s wrote, “Llewellyn’s deft handling of historical detail entwined with an engrossing fictional narrative will appeal to lovers of history, art and a good read. Creole Son engages, educates, and, above all, entertains.” He then ventured into the mystery genre with The Goat Castle Murder, unmasking a sensational real-life crime in 1932 Natchez, Mississippi. He set a time travel trilogy in 1862 New Orleans, 1914 St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Kingdom of Haiti in 1820. Unrefined, Sugar (2018) is a humorous look at growing up in the South of the 1950s, and his most recent work is Defamed (2022), about the scandalous Nancy Randolph of Jeffersonian Virginia.

Michael’s travels have taken him to over 50 countries where he encountered a 6.0 earthquake in Athens, a Hong Kong typhoon, malaria in Brazil, and a Mississippi tornado. He has zip-lined in Costa Rica, white water rafted Bali’s Ayung River, jungle trekked in Guatemala and survived eleven Mardi Gras celebrations. He is married and lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.