Holly Simason is an award winning food and cocktails columnist who worked for the Mount Desert Islander newspaper in Bar Harbor, Maine for ten years.

While working at the paper, she won her first award for her column in 2010. It was at that point her brother Rick Copp saw an opportunity. He writes mysteries and she writes recipes. Combine the two for a new book series. They would write under a pen name comprised of their middle names “Lee” and “Hollis”. And the successful Hayley Powell Food & Cocktails Mystery series was born.

Holly now resides on the Crystal Coast in North Carolina where she continues to write the popular series with her brother. She is also busy creating and testing new recipes for a future Hayley Powell cookbook.

Holly continues to visit her home town of Bar Harbor every summer where the series is set to reconnect with friends and keep her Maine roots intact.

Any similarities between her and Hayley Powell are strictly coincidental.

Rick Copp is a veteran TV and Film scriptwriter whose many credits include The Golden Girls, Wings, Teen Titans, The Brady Bunch Movie, Scooby Doo, Barbershop among many others. Currently he writes, produces and stars in the hit web series Where the Bears Are.

In 2003, he wrote his first comedic murder mystery The Actor’s Guide to Murder, which was followed by two sequels. He also penned a 2007 stand alone novel Fingerprints & Facelifts and a 2010 graphic novel Celebrity Zombie Killers. Once he read his sister’s food and cocktails column, he became an instant fan of her recipes and it was his editor at Kensington Publishing who first suggested a cozy mystery series with recipes featuring an intrepid food columnist with a nose for crime solving.

Rick bounces back and forth between LA where he continues to work on TV and film projects and Palm Springs, California where he writes the Hayley Powell Food and Cocktails Mystery series.