Wanda M. Morris

The manuscript of All Her Little Secrets sat untouched for seven years because Wanda M. Morris doubted anyone wanted a thriller narrated by a Black woman in her forties surrounded by unpleasant colleagues. She finished it anyway. Published in 2021, it won the Lefty Award for Best Debut Mystery Novel and drew nominations for the Anthony, Macavity and Strand Critics awards. Ellice Littlejohn, the only Black attorney at an Atlanta transport company, arrives at work to find her boss dead at his desk, and the promotion that follows pulls her into the company accounts, where money is being routed out through a shell firm, and into her own guarded past. Morris knows the setting from the inside, having practised as a corporate lawyer in the legal departments of Fortune 100 companies. She lives in Atlanta. Her second novel, Anywhere You Run, moves back to Mississippi in the early 1960s.