Helen White Eustis (1916-2015) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and attended Smith College in Massachusetts, where she won a creative writing award. The Horizontal Man (1946), loosely based on her experiences at Smith, won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel the following year. She was the author of several other works of fiction, including The Fool Killer (1954), later adapted into the film of the same name in 1965.

Charles Finch writes both crime fiction (The Laws of Murder) and literary fiction (The Last Enchantments), as well as writing about books for a variety of publications, including Slate, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times.