Hello!

I’m the author of the Kate Daniels series, the Ryan & O’Neil thrillers, and the Stone & Oliver series of police procedurals. In 2010, I was the proud recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award before I was published. In November 2013, I won the Polari First Book Prize for my debut, THE MURDER WALL, the first in the Kate Daniels series which has since been optioned for TV by Sprout Pictures. For my body of work, I won the CWA Dagger in the Library 2017.

Living in a small Northumberland village with my partner, a former murder detective, I became a writer after my career as a Probation Officer was cut short following an assault on duty. I tried different forms of writing before settling on prose. For several years, I was a scriptwriter with an eye on a career in film or TV. This took off when I pitched a crime pilot to the BBC based on the characters in my then unfinished debut novel THE MURDER WALL, winning a place on the BBC’s North East Voices Drama Development Scheme, adapting the script to a crime novel when it ended.

That award-winning book and seven others were published by Pan Macmillan before I moved to Orion in 2017. My ninth book THE LOST, the first in a series featuring DI David Stone and DS Frankie Oliver, was published in the spring. The tenth – THE INSIDER – is due for publication on Nov 1, 2018.

As Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival Reader-in-Residence I look forward to welcoming readers to Harrogate in July and hope you’ll have time to join me for the festival’s Big Read event.

Mari