Hess has been nominated for the Agatha Award five times and won once, for her 1990 short story "Too Much to Bare".
Hess has been nominated for the Agatha Award five times and won once, for her 1990 short story "Too Much to Bare".
The Arly Hanks series is set in Maggody, Arkansas, population 755. The main character is Arly Hanks, Maggody's irreverent young female police chief. The first book of the Arly Hanks series, Malice in Maggody, was the basis for the 1993 CBS television pilot Arly Hanks.
Maggody Files: Hillbilly Cat Great Cat Mysteries: An Anthology of Feline Capers (audio edition by Phoenix Books, 1996).
A longtime resident of Fayetteville, Arkansas, Hess lived in Austin, Texas where she died at her home Nov. 23, 2017.
