Ally Carter

Sarah Leigh Fogleman, from Locust Grove, Oklahoma, read agricultural economics at Oklahoma State University, took a master's at Cornell and spent several years working in that field before writing fiction as Ally Carter, a surname picked so her books would sit near Jennifer Crusie's on the shelf. She began with two adult romances, Cheating at Solitaire (2005) and Learning to Play Gin (2006), but her readership arrived with the Gallagher Girls, set at a Virginia boarding school that trains teenage girls for intelligence work. Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy (2007), Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover (2009) and Only the Good Spy Young (2010) are the second, third and fourth books in that series. Double Crossed, a 2013 novella, brings the Gallagher Academy together with the art thieves of her Heist Society books. The Blonde Identity, published by Avon in 2023, returned her to adult fiction: a woman wakes in Paris with no memory and finds she has a twin who is a spy.