About – Mette Ivie Harrison

About

Short Bio

Mette Ivie Harrison (now Mette Marie Ivie) is the national best-selling, award-winning author of The Bishop’s Wife, published in 2014 with Soho Press, as well as A Special interest in Murder, the first book in the Ada Latia autistic detective series (Mette was diagnosed with autism in 2017) and The Ex-Wives Murder Club with Severn House. She holds a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton, is divorced and now works in the financial industry. Before writing adult mysteries, she wrote numerous YA fantasies, including the award-winning and acclaimed Mira, Mirror, and The Princess and the Hound. For nearly fifty years, she was an active, believing Mormon, but has distanced herself from the church and only attends occasionally now. She has five living children and lost her youngest at birth in 2005. She is an accomplished, nationally ranked triathlete and has competed in two Ironman World Championships.

Long Bio

Mette Marie Ivie was born ninth of eleven children. She grew up on a farmhouse in central New Jersey before moving to Utah for high school. She spent her sophomore year at a German Gymnasium (high school) and began taking college German courses when she returned to Utah. At age seventeen, she was awarded the “Ezra Taft Benson Scholarship” at Brigham Young University, an honor reserved for only twelve young Mormon women and men. At age nineteen, Harrison graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in German in 1990, only two years after high school, and went to Princeton on full scholarship for a PhD program, which she finished in 1995. She married in 1990 and had five children from 1994-2002.

Her first published works were in the young adult genre: The Monster In Me (2002), Mira, Mirror (2004), The Princess and the Hound (2006) and other books. In 2005, she lost her sixth child, Mercy, at birth, and this changed everything: her views on God, the after-life, and slowly, inexorably, her belief in Mormonism. She experienced a serious bout of depression and recurring problems with suicidal ideation, which she still battles off and on and writes about on her Substack Kicking and Screaming (metteh.substack.com).

In 2014, The Bishop’s Wife, an adult mystery set in Mormon, Utah and questioning Mormon gender norms, came out with Soho Press to much acclaim nationally, and considerable controversy locally. Four more books in that series have since been published (His Right Hand, For Time and All Eternities, Not Of This Fold, and The Prodigal Daughter), each focusing on different controversial topics–LGBTQ+ Mormons, polygamous Mormons, racial issues, and youth homelessness and rape culture among Mormons. Harrison published numerous books with the local Mormon press BCC, including

Harrison also had a long-running series about Mormonism published from 2016-2019 with Huffington Post on a variety of topics and a now defunct podcast “The Mormon Sabbatical” until the pressure from within Mormonism and her own marriage forced her to step away from her old life and rebuilt entirely anew. In 2021, she began working in the financial world and has since become a licensed security trader and earned her CFP and CDFA designations. A long hiatus in actively writing and publishing was a necessary part of the acutely painful journey away from the roles as wife and mother she was told were all that she should pursue. 2025 marked the first book published after the divorce and reclaiming of herself. Expect more good things to come!