“Maybe it was the failed attempt at a start-up company, or an early mid-life crisis, but one morning I decided to follow my oldest passion, started writing, and never want to look back.”

Hannah Mary McKinnon: INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF SUSPENSE NOVELS

Hello, and welcome!

I was born in Manchester, UK to British & Swiss parents. A year later they moved my older sister and me to Switzerland. Rather unsurprisingly I love mountains, chocolate and cheese…or mountains of chocolate and cheese, and my sister, of course.

After completing commercial studies in Geneva, I worked as a PA for DuPont. A year later I moved to Neuchâtel and became the Purchasing Manager for a high-tech company that made motors for industrial and space applications. While working, I returned to university, studying part-time for a Bachelor of Science. And then a friend of a friend introduced me to another friend who’d started up an IT recruitment business. I joined the company late 1995, and over the next fifteen years rose through the ranks to become CEO.

Things outside of work were hardly boring, either. A chance encounter back in the dark ages of the Internet in 1999 led me down the aisle with Rob, my Canadian rock, five months later. Actually it was exactly ten weeks after we met face-to-face at the Saint John airport in New Brunswick, Canada – and we’re still married. True story. Our first son was born in 2003, followed by identical twin boys just sixteen months later, so I’m heavily outnumbered (and at 5ft8 officially the shortest of the family).

My writing career began after we moved to Oakville in Ontario, Canada in 2010. Maybe it was the failed attempt at a start-up company, or an early mid-life crisis, but one morning I decided to follow my oldest passion, started writing, and never wanted to look back. My first book was a romantic-comedy, but then I switched to the dark side of suspense (say it with me: muahahaha).

In 2023, I returned to the softer side with the holiday romantic-comedy The Christmas Wager, written as Holly Cassidy. If rom-coms aren’t your jam, fear not. More thrillers are coming your way.

Happy reading!

Hannah Mary