Maxie Dara is a writer and actor from Ontario, Canada. She has been a freelance journalist focusing on the local arts and culture scene
for more than five years, with bylines in publications such as
Hamilton Magazine and
Beyond James, among others. She is also a two-time award-winning playwright, taking home the Best of Fringe award at the 2017 Hamilton Fringe Festival for the musical comedy
This Is Not a Musical: The Musical! and the 2020 Torpedo Prize for her play
Alone Together, a pandemic drama. Dara knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of seven, when she first fell in love with the written word. She also wanted to be a mermaid but has mostly focused on the writing side of things.
Her new novel is
A Grim Reaper's Guide to Catching a Killer.
At Electric Lit Dara tagged "seven fun, innovative reads that really put some 'life' into the afterlife." One title on the list:
A Rip Through Time by Kelley Armstrong
It takes a pretty special detective to solve their own attempted murder—twice. After being strangled in an alleyway in modern-day Edinburgh, Scotland, Detective Mallory wakes up in the body of a Victorian maid who’d had the very same rope around her neck 150 years earlier. Now Mallory gets to put her 21st-century knowledge to the test and help her cute undertaker boss figure out who keeps trying to kill her across lifetimes. This book struck the perfect balance between pithy, macabre, and supernatural to keep me hooked (though it certainly didn’t hurt that I got to read it while traveling through Edinburgh myself, thankfully with no ropes involved).
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue