Mysteries with a Theme Park Smile

What the heck are mysteries with a theme park smile and who am I?

I’m glad you asked.

I’m Ann Meier. I live in Orlando and write Mysteries with a Theme Park Smile for both adult and middle grade readers. Hopefully, you’ll get an opportunity to read them soon. This is the dream of every yet-to-be-published writer. And I so hope it isn’t my dying wish.

My humorous adult cozy series features Janie McGetrick, an Orlando theme park manager. Janie unfairly catches the blame when Glinda the Good Witch’s parade float crushes Janie’s boss on the Yellow Brick Road in Once Upon a Time theme park. And you guessed it. The big bosses fired Janie from her dream job for what they called ‘the incident’. Banished from her beloved Oz, Janie is determined to shake her undeserved boss-killer reputation and redeem herself.

My middle grade mysteries feature an eleven-year-old boy named Ian and his best friends Emma and Sebastian. They call themselves Ian’s Investigators and they solve mysteries. By some incredible coincidence, their adventures also take place in the same fictional Orlando theme parks as my cozy mysteries.

To ‘visit’ the theme parks or learn more about the cozy or middle grade stories, please click on the links in the upper right side of the header.

 The parks are fictional, but I was a manager on the Universal Orlando Resort opening team and also worked at Walt Disney World. I’ve received seven Royal Palm Literary Awards from The Florida Writers Association for my manuscripts. I’m a member of Mystery Writers of America, Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, Sisters in Crime, and Florida Writers Association. I think I may have a bit of a ‘joiner’ problem.

I’ve co-authored a college textbook, Beginnings: The Psychology of Early Childhood, written journal articles, and worked in human resources for a Fortune 100 company. I earned an undergraduate degree in English from Ball State University and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park. And honest, I’m not stuffy or academic. It’s just that once I started taking college courses, I didn’t know when to stop. I’m represented by Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli of the JET Literary Agency.