Mary Beth McGruder is a native Nashvillian who moved to the North Carolina coast, where she writes about love, marriage, grief, and the small mercies that keep us afloat.

Her novel Ghost Notes, complete at 92,000 words, is a tribute to the Nashville she knows and loves: the music, the mythmaking, the backstage silences, and the complicated people behind the songs. It follows a disgraced journalist hired to ghostwrite the private memoir of a dying country music legend determined to leave his children the truth he could never say aloud.

Mary Beth is also the author of Public Trust, an 83,000-word upmarket domestic suspense novel set between Charleston and Paris. When a curated marriage and real-estate empire begin to crack, a woman trained in optics stops correcting, starts documenting, and quietly builds the story that will save her. Public Trust was a finalist in Bardsy’s 2025 First Chapter Anthology Contest.

Her other work includes Last Plane Out, a suspense novel set in a remote Alaskan village where the line between protection and control blurs, and The Library of Borrowed Days, a speculative short story that received a Silver Honorable Mention in the 2026 Writers of the Future Contest.