I was born in Surrey and went to school in Guildford. Late teenage years were spent on a smallholding in Shropshire in the middle of absolutely bloody nowhere. A visit to the cinema involved a forty-mile round trip and nights out consisted of “dances” in village halls with the boys on one side of the floor and the girls on the other. I attended university in Birmingham and half-completed a PhD at Brighton in Sussex, before deciding that life as a postgraduate wasn’t quite as much fun as being a regular student (too much work and not enough sex, drugs and rock and roll).
I have had a number of occupations, being variously a farmer, drummer and (most successfully) a programmer. Now my hi-tech web developer’s suite, otherwise known as a shed in the garden, has been converted into a writer’s den and I write full-time.
Home is not far from Plymouth (DI Savage’s patch) in rural Devon close to the sea. There hasn’t been a murder round here for years.
The Holm and da Silva series is published by Canelo, while the Charlotte Savage series is published by HarperCollins. I am represented by Claire Roberts at Claire Roberts Global Literary Management.
Five Things You Didn’t Know + One Very Creepy Fact
I used to live in Brighton and originally that was where Charlotte Savage was going to be based… then I realised that Peter James had got there first.
When I started writing the series DI Savage wasn’t called Savage and she was a bloke.
I live in a remote cottage that the Plymouth artist Robert Lenkiewicz used to use as a studio and as a place to convalesce. He painted many of the images in his “Landscape” project from the front garden.
My favourite crime writer is Graham Hurley. His Faraday and Winter series is quite simply unparalleled (although recently I’ve been reading a lot of Don Winslow – his trilogy about the Mexican drug trade is just brilliant, certainly the best crime novels of the last few years).
I love sailing, playing my tenor ukulele (badly) and getting out on Dartmoor.
Very Creepy Fact: Ted Bundy was executed on my birthday…
