About Us

Taffy Cannon has been organizing spaces and places and materials her entire life, a process she was surprised to discover isn't enjoyed by everyone. She started out organizing drawers and cupboards to earn money for church camp as a girl in her native Chicago. Since then she's organized estates, kitchens, libraries, closets, offices, craft materials, and collections of everything from political buttons to antique postcards.

She has also brought order to the lives of countless fictional characters over the past quarter century, beginning with her first novel in 1985, Convictions: A Novel of the Sixties. Her fourteen published novels include three mysteries in the Nan Robinson series about a California State Bar attorney-investigator, four cozy mysteries in the Booked for Travel series set around the USA, a young adult mystery and five stand-alone mysteries.

Guns and Roses was a Best Novel nominee for the Agatha and Macavity Mystery Awards, and Blood Matters was awarded Best Mystery/Thriller in the San Diego Book Awards.   Among recent short story publications, the 2011 anthology San Diego Noir featured her unforgettable story "Instant Karma."

But life can't all be murder and mayhem.

Taffy has also been active in Southern California Library Friends groups for decades, beginning when she walked into her Los Angeles branch library to volunteer for an advertised book sale and learned that an organization had to be established first. She did that, became the first President and served there six years.

Since moving to San Diego County in 1990, she's run dozens of Carlsbad Library Friends book sales, served another nine years as Friends President, and created a Friends Bookstore in 1999 that she has managed ever since. Over the years, her efforts have raised well over a million dollars to benefit the Library, and in 2004 she received a Presidential Gold Medal for over 4000 hours of community service.

Through a lucky series of events, she discovered that the organizing gifts she had always taken for granted were in fact a marketable skill.  In 2008, she formed Blue Skies Clutter Control to share that talent and skill with others.