Friday, May 11, at 7 p.m., at the Westin Hotel, award-winning mystery writer Jeremiah Healy moderates a panel of South Florida writers on the subject of choosing location for their writings. Jeremiah Healy is the creator of the John Francis Cuddy private investigator series and the author of several legal thrillers. A former sheriff’s officer and military police captain, Healy is also a graduate of Rutgers College and the Harvard Law School. He practiced law in Boston before teaching for 18 years at the New England School of Law. His first novel, “Blunt Darts,” was published in 1984 and introduced Cuddy, the Boston-based private eye who has become Healy’s best-known character. Moral, honest — and violent, when need-be — Cuddy makes his living solving cases that have fallen through the cracks of the formal judicial system. Of his 13 Cuddy novels and two collections of short stories, 15 have either won or been nominated for the Shamus Award. The John Cuddy mystery series has received praise from some of the major newspaper reviewers in the country, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Sun Times and USA Today.

Panelists include Sandra Balzo, an award-winning author of crime fiction, including eight books in two different mystery series — one set outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the other in the High Country of North Carolina. “Triple Shot,” the seventh Maggy Thorsen Wisconsin coffeehouse mystery, was released in December, and “Dead Ends,” the second North Carolina novel, will be out this summer. Balzo’s books have garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, while being recommended to readers of Janet Evanovich, Charlaine Harris, Harlan Coben, Joan Hess and Margaret Maron. A recent member of the National Board of Directors for the Mystery Writers of America, Balzo and her fiancé, fellow crime writer Jeremiah Healy, split their time between South Florida and North Carolina.

Michael Haskins, originally from Boston, is the writer of the Mick Murphy Key West Mystery series. In December Haskins’ “Stairway to the Bottom” was released and in August “Car Wash Blues” will come out. His short stories, a continuation of his series, have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. He came to Key West 15 years ago, after living in Los Angeles, Tijuana, Mexico and San Juan, Puerto Rico, to work as the business editor/ writer for The Key West Citizen and then as the city’s public information officer. Today he writes full time and on occasion does reporting on the Keys for Reuters News Service in Miami.

For 30 years, Mike Dennis was a professional musician, retiring from full-time playing around 2003. He then became a professional poker player and moved to Las Vegas. In late 2009,  a   time to developing a platform for his books. Since then he has published four more novels, a novelette, a  moved back to Key West, where he helped establish the Casa Marina Group, an organization of dedicated fiction writers.

Jonathan Woods resides in Key West. Of his spine tingle Awardwinning collection of noir crime stories “Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness” and “Mayhem,” (New Pulp Press: 2010) Booklist wrote:  plummets like Fred Astaire on methamphetamine.” Woods’ new crime novel, “A Death in Mexico,” was published May 1. “Brutal as the kick of raw mescal … powerful,” wrote Publishers Weekly. “A great and telling ride south of the border into madness and mayhem. I loved it,” said best-selling crime novelist Michael Connelly, author of the Harry Bosch series and “The Lincoln Lawyer.”