Separately, Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer are two distinct voices. Together, they write something else entirely.
Jennifer Crusie is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels in contemporary romance. Her heroines are complicated, funny, and stubborn as they cope with the absurdities life throws at them, and her stories manage to be warm and romantic without being naive.Â
Bet Me won the RITA Award for Best Contemporary Single Title and is a fan favorite. In this book Minerva Dobbs is a curvy, carb-loving woman who overhears a man bet his friend that he can’t get her into bed in a month. Instead of being crushed, she decides to play along—and what follows is a smart, funny, emotionally satisfying romance.Â
Bob Mayer is a West Point graduate and former Green Beret who started writing in 1991. He’s published over 75 books including military thrillers, science fiction, historical fiction, and time travel adventure incorporating elements of his military background that lend a bone-deep authenticity to his stories.
His Green Beret series (start with Eyes of the Hammer) are fast-paced, gritty, and operationally precise. They’re the books military fiction readers recommend when someone asks for a story that feels genuinely real. Mayer has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and on NPR.
Together: Agnes and the Hitman
When Crusie and Mayer first started writing together, readers weren’t sure what to expect. Two writers from completely different genres, splitting the same book between them? It sounded like a recipe for whiplash. What they delivered instead was one of the most purely entertaining books of the past two decades.
Crusie and Mayer met in September 2004 at the Maui Writers Conference, where they happened to be teaching in adjacent rooms. By the time the conference ended, they’d become friends and were sketching out the outline for a novel together that they wrote primarily by email, with Crusie handling the female protagonist’s scenes and Mayer handling the male protagonist’s.
Agnes and the Hitman is the story of Agnes Crandall—food writer, cookbook author, and wielder of a cast-iron frying pan—who is trying to host her goddaughter’s wedding at her newly purchased dream home in South Carolina when things go catastrophically wrong. A dognapper invades her kitchen. Dead bodies start accumulating. A hitman named Shane (no last name, just Shane) climbs through her window, sent by his mob-connected uncle to protect her. And then the missing five million dollars becomes everyone’s problem.
Booklist gave it a starred review. Kirkus called it a “raucous romance” that’s “laugh-out-loud funny.” Readers call it one of their most-reread books of all time. The genius is in the contrast: Crusie’s chaotic, bantering, emotionally raw Agnes against Mayer’s quiet, lethal, stoic Shane. The mob, the flamingos, the wedding chaos, and the breakfast food all somehow cohere into something that defies any single genre label. It’s screwball comedy. It’s romantic suspense. It’s The Godfather filtered through Julia Child. Just read it.
What They’re Writing Now
After a fourteen-year break from collaborating, Crusie and Mayer came roaring back in 2023 with the Liz Danger series—three fast-released mysteries set in a small Ohio town, featuring ghostwriter Liz Danger and former Army Ranger turned small-town cop Vince Cooper. Funny, sharp, and satisfying, the series showed their collaborative voice was better than ever. Hot on its heels came the Rocky Start series, set in a Smoky Mountains town where retired covert operatives try—and largely fail—to lead quiet lives. More books in both worlds are already planned.
Whether you start solo or dive straight into the collaborations, one thing is certain: these two are writing some of the most fun, most re-readable books available right now. Where will you start?