Biography - Betty Brandt Passick

BETTY BRANDT PASSICK is an independent author, inspirational speaker, and writing teacher. She grew up in the small town of Fairbank, Iowa (population 1,000), where few people would expect the idea for a gangster series, yet this is where she draws inspiration for her historical crime novels. Gangster in Our Midst, Bookkeeper, Lieutenant, and Sometimes Hitman for Al Capone (2017) tells the fact-based story of an Italian American mobster who came to her hometown (called ‘Oxbow’ in her books) in the 1920s, where he remained off and on for the next sixty years. During the pandemic, she returned to ‘Oxbow’ to write The Black Bag of Dr. Wiltse, Murder on the Prairie (2021), to tell an earlier piece of the gangster story, about the family who built Hotel Wiltse, a prominent setting in Gangster in Our Midst. Both novels won Indie Book Awards from Shelf Unbound book review magazine; in February 2025, Gangster in Our Midst won the Editor’s Choice Award of Literary Excellence from Reader’s House book review magazine in the UK. Book #3 in the series, Anatomy of a Death, will launch in April 2026.

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