Matt Cost, a.k.a. Matthew Langdon Cost, was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing. And that’s what he does. He writes histories and mysteries.

His Clay Wolfe/Port Essex series follows the highly lauded Mainely Mystery series by Cost. Acclaimed author Gerry Boyle selected the first in that series, Mainely Power, to be the Maine Humanities Council Read ME fiction book of the year.

Cost's historical fiction titles include Love in a Time of Hate, about a young man from Maine fights for social equality in New Orleans after the Civil War while pursuing a serial killer, becoming enmeshed in voodoo, and falling in love; At Every Hazard, which traces Joshua Chamberlain's evolution from an arrogant, overbearing professor to unwitting and unlikely hero and leader of men. Interwoven are subplots including the coming of age of his young orphaned aide, a complicated marriage, and of course, lots of rousing battle scenes; and I Am Cuba: Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, a historically accurate novel detailing society, politics, war, and love in Cuba in the 1950s.