Robin Hazard Ray

Robin Hazard Ray’s first murder mystery, The Strangers’ Tomb, set in Boston's historic Mount Auburn Cemetery, takes place in the tumultuous period before the Civil War in Boston, as Irish immigrants, fugitive slaves, and ambitious scientists jostle for survival among the fading but still-powerful Puritan aristocracy.

Her highly anticipated new book, The Soldiers' Rest, takes up the thread after the Civil War, when so many lives have been altered and damaged.

A docent at Mount Auburn Cemetery, Ray has led tours and given talks on Boston History, Rivals in Science, the Ice Age Landscape, Mount Auburn’s Posthumous LGBTQ Pride, and Isabella Stewart Gardner and Her Circle.

An accomplished writer and journalist, she has written for the MIT News, the Boston Book Review, the Boston Herald, Civilization magazine, and Sweet Auburn, the country's only cemetery-published magazine. Her scholarly papers have appeared in the journals Italian Americana and Quaker History. Her mystery stories have been published the Mystery magazine and in anthologies of the Best New England Crime Stories (2022 and 2023). She is a proud member of Sisters in Crime New England.

She has extensive experience editing scholarly works in Art History, Architectural History, Art Conservation, and Antiquities, including books for Getty Publishing, the Getty Conservation Institute, and Cambridge University Press.

A graduate of Brown University, she lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with her husband and two black cats.