About
Mary Beth McGruder is a native Nashvillian who moved to the North Carolina coast in 2024. After a lifetime in the city that taught her how stories get made and remade, she now writes from a quieter shore.
Her novel Ghost Notes is a tribute to the Nashville she knows and loves: the music, the mythmaking, the old rooms and back roads, the backstage silences, the complicated people behind the songs. It is a love letter to a city that runs on collaboration and competition and the long, careful work of turning a private feeling into something a stranger can hear.
She writes upmarket domestic suspense and speculative-leaning literary fiction, drawn to power with good manners and the quiet systems that shape what people say, what they hide, and what they choose when the story starts to crack.
Before turning to fiction full time, she spent more than 25 years in user experience design and product storytelling, helping startups and Fortune 500 companies turn complex goals into intuitive digital experiences. Her work focused on the gap between what people claim they want and what they actually do. She is also a founding member of an AI company — experience that sharpened her interest in how technology impacts the written word.
Her fiction is precise and scene-driven, building psychological pressure through setting, subtext, and consequential choices, from polished social worlds to remote places where logistics and silence become leverage. When she isn't writing, she is usually near the water, reading, or learning to golf, with her husband as her first reader and editor and her dog, Mrs. Bigglesworth, supervising the work.