Joanne B. Reid writes in the shadows. Not the kind you find in alleyways or the underside of fire escapes—though she knows those places well—but the shadows where character meets consequence, and where truth rarely walks out clean.
Born on the ragged edge of Canada and raised in a one-room schoolhouse, Joanne’s roots run deep in small-town grit and cold wind memory. She’s lived in seven provinces, each one adding a notch of understanding about people, power, and what happens when you mix the two. Her fiction lives where the smoke never clears, where justice is a coin flipped in the dark, and no one gets away unchanged.
Drawing inspiration from classic noir, post-WWI moral chaos, and the whisper of old scandals, she crafts historical thrillers and character-driven mysteries that cut with purpose. Whether she’s resurrecting a young Sam Spade in The Rough Cut series, building morally complex heroes like Elias Parr in Dominion Man, or turning Macbeth into a snowbound Canadian crime story, Joanne writes stories where every motive has a bruise and every hero walks with a limp.
When she’s not writing, Joanne teaches the craft—breaking down what makes noir tick in her course What the Hell Is Noir?, and helping others find their own dark groove on the page. She’s currently expanding her publishing footprint, launching serialized short fiction, and developing her first full-length series for print and screen.
She doesn’t write cozies. She writes consequences.