Christopher Willis Gortner is an American author of historical fiction, including the novels The Last Queen, The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, and the Spymaster Trilogy.

Mademoiselle Chanel was a USA Today best-seller, an American Booksellers Association bestseller, and both The Last Queen and Marlene were Marin Independent Journal best-sellers.

He was named one of the top ten historical novelists by The Washington Independent Review of Books and has delivered keynote speeches as a Guest of Honor at the Historical Novel Society Conferences in the United States and the United Kingdom.

For ten years before he was published and became a full-time writer, he was a public health administrative analyst.

[4] He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in San Francisco and Masters of Fine Arts in Writing with a concentration in Renaissance Studies from the New College of California.