BIOGRAPHY

It's been quite a time since I updated this, but as I've said before, you can't rewrite the past, so not much has been altered.

I still live in north London - not too far from the location of PREY - and during the early period of research for this latest book, I had the joy of roaming around Hampstead and Belsize Park with my husband, but then I lost him, very suddenly - and lost the will, for some time, to continue writing. Eventually, though, I'm grateful to say, that appetite returned, and the result is PREY.

As for the distant past, I was never what you might call 'scholarly', spent far too much time daydreaming - for me, perhaps, good practice for fiction writing. I read novels for pleasure but found essays a chore - and then I escaped formal education and began the real business of learning. I acted briefly, then switched to the production side, working in radio drama for the BBC and London's Capital Radio Drama Department, travelling whenever possible and living for a time in New York City and Rhode Island.

My writing had ambushed me out of the blue, startling me with an inexplicable but powerful urge to begin. More than five years later, after working on my manuscript every free hour, I sold my first novel, IN LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP, which became a bestseller at home, in the US and many other countries, translated into seventeen languages, followed by CHATEAU ELLA and several family sagas, including SHATTERED STARS, SPELLBOUND and FASCINATION. As my writing style became increasingly suspenseful, my body-count multiplied, and it seemed a natural progression to turn to crime and psychological thrillers like IF I SHOULD DIE (a medical thriller), TOO CLOSE, DEADLY GAMES, TWISTED MINDS and COMPULSION.

The first of my Florida-based Detective Sam Becket books was MIND GAMES, and several years passed, publishing one standalone title a year, before the second Becket, LAST RUN, came along, and after that poor Sam's and Grace's troubles just kept on coming. Then another standalone, WHIRLWIND, about a deranged, highly intelligent psychopath on the loose in New England, culminating in a snow-bound Christmas Eve night of terror.

And now, PREY, my twenty-sixth novel, to be published by Severn House on October 1st, 2024, in the UK and US. Other publication dates to follow.