Louise Anderson

Louise Anderson was born in 1966. She was brought up in Glasgow, gaining an MA from Glasgow University in 1988. The same year she moved to the USA with her husband. They returned to Glasgow in 1991, where she works in accounts and marketing. She has two school-aged children, one dog and two cats. She is currently working on her second book.

Dr Roger Berrett

Dr Roger Berrett has been a practising forensic scientist since 1967 when he joined the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory (Scotland Yard ) having completed a degree and a Doctorate in Chemistry at Birkbeck College, University of London.He has worked in many areas of Forensic Chemistry and was head of the Drugs and Toxicology section prior to being appointed as the Staff Officer to the Director of the laboratory.

Since 1988 he has specialised in fire investigation in both the public and private sector and has dealt with many high profile cases in the UK and overseas.   He is a founder member of the ‘Fire and Explosion Working Group’ of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI) and has lectured and presented papers at national and international conferences.  Dr Berrett is a long standing member of the Forensic Science Society and has been a member of Council and a Vice President of the Society.

Born and brought up in Birmingham, Mark Billingham is acknowledged as one of the UK's top comperes, with a string of credits to his name. Mark is a regular at Jongleurs and the Comedy Store and has the honour of being the first human on Spitting Image. Though still working as a stand-up comic, Mark now concentrates on writing the series of crime novels featuring London-based detective Tom Thorne. 

His debut, Sleepyhead, was an instant bestseller in the UK -it hit the Sunday Times Top 10 and became the number one hardback fiction debut of Summer 2001. At the time on booktrack it was the fastest selling debut. Scaredy Cat sold over 190000 in paperback! His third book, Lazy Bones, sold over 53000 in hardback and is out in paperback in April.

His fourth book, The Burning Girl was published in July 2004.  Mark lives in North London with his wife and two children. 

Tom Bradby

ITN Correspondent, Tom Bradby first hit the news headlines in 1999 when his leg was shattered by a flare whilst he was reporting on the post-election riots in Jakarta. Having joined ITN as a trainee in 1990, he spent the first 3 years of his career as Ireland correspondent before going on to become Political Correspondent, and then Correspondent for Asia for 4 years. He became Royal Correspondent at the end of 2001, in a move which the media reported as being a ploy by ITN to create a ‘Royal Prince Charming’ to rival the BBC’s ‘Queen of Royal Reporting’, Jennie Bond. He has been at the forefront of TV reporting on the historical events of the Golden Jubilee, and the crisis facing the House of Windsor following the collapse of the Paul Burrell trial. He is the author of previous thrillers Shadow Dancer, The Sleep of the Dead and The Master of Rain, which was shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for thriller of the year. The White Russian was shortlisted for the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger for 2003. Tom is married with three children and currently lives in the UK. 

Kate Bradley

Kate Bradley is the current Head of Fiction and also the Mystery and Thriller buyer in BCA, the largest direct mail bookseller.  Before joining BCA Kate was a Branch Manager at Waterstone's for 10-years in the central London area. She reads great crime novels from great crime writers and actually get paid for it.

Simon Brett

Simon Brett worked as a producer in radio and television before taking upwriting full time. As well as the Fethering mysteries, the Mrs Pargeter novels and the Charles Paris detective series, he is the author of several radio and television series. Married with three grown up children, Simon lives in an Agatha Christie-style village on the South Downs. The sixth novel in the Fethering series, The Witness at the Wedding, was published this year.

Gianrico Carofiglio

Gianrico Carofiglio, born in 1961, is an antimafia judge in the Southern Italian city of Bari. He has been responsible for some of the most important indictments in the region involving organized crime, corruption and the traffic in human beings. Involuntary Witness is his debut novel and has won a number of literary awards such as the Marisa Rusconi and Rhegium Julii prizes. It is a best-seller in Italy and the basis for a major television series currently in production.

Carofiglio has since written two other novels, including Ad Occhi Chiusi which features Guido Guerrieri the hero of Involuntary Witness and which will be published by Bitter Lemon Press in 2006.

Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat.  In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. 

After three years on the crime beat in L.A., Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch.  Connelly's 2004 novel, The Narrows, is the sequel to The Poet. To accompany this Harry Bosch novel, a limited edition DVD was released, Blue Neon Night, Michael Connelly's Los Angeles. In this film, Michael Connelly provides an insider's tour of the places that give his stories and characters their spark and texture.

Connelly's next book, the Harry Bosch novel, The Closers, will be released in May.He lives in Florida with his wife and daughter.

Ann Cleeves

As a member of the 'Murder Squad', Ann works with other Northern writers to promote crime fiction. Ann has published four novels of psychological suspense: The Crow Trap, The Sleeping and the Dead, Burial of Ghosts and, most recently, Telling Tales. She is also the author of the Inspector Ramsay novels. Ann lives in West Yorkshire.

Natasha Cooper

An ex-publisher, past Chair of the Crime Writers' Association, and lifelong Londoner, Natasha Cooper sets her novels in the city that she loves. She also writes for a variety of newspapers and journals, including Crime Time and The Times Literary Supplement, and has contributed to many radio programmes such as Woman's Hour and Saturday Review.  She regularly speaks at crime-writing conferences on both sides of the Atlantic.

Her interest in prison reform has led her to lecture in one male prison, spend a fund-raising night in another, and to speak in a debate at the Oxford Union on the murder of James Bulger. She is the author of, among many others, Keep Me Alive, A place of Safety and Out of the Dark.  In 2002 she was shortlisted for the Dagger in the Library, an award that 'goes to the author whose work has given most pleasure to readers'.

Stella Duffy

Stella Duffy is mainly known as a writer of novels, short stories and plays, but about a third of her time is spent performing – acting, improvisation, directing and presenting 

She was born in London, but was raised and educated in New Zealand, taking a BA in English Literature at Victoria University before moving to England seventeen years ago.  This might explain why she has now played three Scottish housewives in various television advertisements, and a London policewoman with Boris Becker and Mika Hakkinnen for Mercedes.  

She has written eight novels.  Her latest, STATE OF HAPPINESS, is published in January by Virago, and has been optioned for a feature film.  The others include Singling Out the Couples, Eating Cake and Immaculate Conceit, published by Sceptre; and four crime novels Calendar Girl, Wavewalker, Beneath the Blonde and Fresh Flesh, published by Serpent’s tail.  With Lauren Henderson, she is the co-editor of the anthology Tart Noir, from which her short story Martha Grace won the CWA Short Story Dagger Award in 2002.   

She has worked for the past 15 years with the comedy company Spontaneous Combustion and is also a member of Improbable Theatre’s highly-acclaimed Lifegame company which appeared at the Royal National Theatre in May, 

She has written three solo shows – The Tedious Predictability of Falling in Love for herself, Close to You for actor and singer Sarah Davison, and a third show for herself, Breastrokes.  Like many London-based actors, she has appeared on The Bill.  

Liz Evans

Liz Evans has worked in all sorts of companies from plastic moulding manufacturers to Japanese banks through to film production and BBC radio.  She was born in Highgate, went to school in Barnet and now lives in Boreham Wood, Hertfordshire.  Her previous books featuring PI Grace Smith are Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?, JFK Is Missing!, Don’t Mess With Mrs In-Between, Barking! and Sick As A Parrot.  Liz Evans has been nominated for the CWA Dagger in the Library and is Secretary of the CWA.  Liz’s publicist is Angela McMahon and Michael’s is Gaby Young.

Jasper Fflorde

Jasper Fforde worked in the film industry for 19 years where his varied career included the role of "focus puller" on films such as Goldeneye, The Mask of Zorro and Entrapment.  He had been writing purely for his own amusement for several years, but always harboured a dream of trading in his film career to become a full time writer.

Jasper’s first novel The Eyre Affair was published in July 2001. Over the next three years Jasper's novels in the Thursday Next series, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten were published. All four novels were an instant hit entering the New York Times Bestseller List in their first week of publication and he now appears at all of the top literary festivals across the globe.

In July ’05 Jasper begins a new series of books – called Nursery Crime - with the publication of The Big Over Easy, a police procedural into the universal mystery “Who killed Humpty Dumpty?” Jasper lives and writes in Wales and has a passion for aviation.

Francis Fyfield

Frances Fyfield is a criminal lawyer, a trade she has used to huge success in many of her novels.  She lives in London and in Deal, by the sea, which is her passion.  She has won several awards, including the Silver Dagger.  Dramatisations of her earlier novels, starring Amanda Burton, have recently been broadcast on national television.   

Frances is one of the few crime writers who is able to bridge the gap between genre fiction and mainstream. She receives consistently good reviews and is held in high esteem by her fellow crime writers. She writes novels rich in character, humour and compassion in a way that satisfies the non-crime reader, without ever neglecting the true storyteller’s imperative of breathtaking suspense.  

John Fullerton

John Fullerton is the author of three novels that deal with contemporary warfare and espionage. His first was The Monkey House, set in Bosnia. His second thriller, A Hostile Place, deals with the fate of Osama bin Laden after September 11, and his latest, Give Me Death, is both a tender love story and a voyage into that heart of darkness known as terrorism in the Middle East.

Fullerton has drawn heavily on his experiences as a Reuters correspondent working in 38 countries and covering a dozen wars in a career spanning thirty years. He has just completed his fourth novel, set in South Africa, and dealing with the themes of friendship, love and betrayal.

Jonny Geller

Jonny Geller  trained as an actor and is a literary agent and managing director of the books division of Curtis Brown, the largest independent agency in the UK. His clients include: Jake Arnott, Tracy Chevalier, Susanna Clarke, Vikram Seth, Howard Jacobson,  Hari Kunzru, Adele Parks, Anna Maxted, David Nicholls, Michael Marshall, David Wolstencroft and Jon Snow. Jonny is 37.  

Peter Guttridge

Sussex-based Peter Guttridge was born in Burnley, Lancashire and educated at Oxford and Nottingham Universities. He is the Observer's crime fiction reviewer and the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton. He also writes about –  and doggedly practices – astanga vinyasa yoga.

He has written six satirical crime novels featuring yoga-obsessed journalist Nick Madrid and Bridget "Bitch of the Broadsheets" Frost.

David Hewson

David Hewson was born in Yorkshire in 1953. He worked as staff writer on The Times from 1978, and has written eight novels, as well as a number of travel books. He is now a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times. David's latest novel, The Sacred Cut, is the third in his Italian crime series featuring Nic Costa, following A Season for the Dead and The Villa of Mysteries. David lives in Kent.

Reg Hill

Reginald Hill was born in 1936 in Hartlepool in the North-East of England. At the time his father was a professional footballer playing for Hartlepool United, but Reg says he never took to the round ball game, much preferring rugby which actively encouraged the drinking of beer both before and after (and sometimes during) the game. 

When he was three his family moved to Cumbria, where Reginald spent his entire childhood before going off to Oxford University and eventually becoming a teacher. 

He spent many years as a teacher in Yorkshire which provided the inspiration and setting for the novels featuring the Falstaffian figure of Andy Dalziel, Head of Mid Yorkshire CID. In 1970 his first book, A Clubbable Woman, was published by Collins and featured Dalziel and his more sensitive sidekick, Peter Pascoe. Hill was hailed as 'the crime novel's best hope' and, thirty years on, he has more than fulfilled that prophecy. The series of 20 books (and counting) featuring the ever-popular pair has have gone from strength to strength and been turned into a hugely successful BBC television series featuring Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan. 

Reginald Hill has written over forty books in many genres, from historical novels to science fiction. His crime writing includes the series featuring the likeable redundant lathe operator turned PI from Luton, Joe Sixsmith (Singing the Sadness, Killing the Lawyers, Blood Sympathy and Born Guilty) and several thrillers under the pseudonym, Patrick Ruell (The Only Game, Death of a Dormouse etc.) 

Hill has won many awards for his books and short stories. One of the most notable was the Crime Writers' Association's prestigious Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year for Bones and Silence. In 1995 he was further honoured by the Crime Writers' Association with their Cartier Diamond Dagger for his lifetime contribution to crime writing. 

Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz's life might have been copied from the pages of Charles Dickens or the Brothers Grimm. Born in 1956 in Stanmore, Middlesex, to a family of wealth and status, Anthony was raised by nannies, surrounded by servants and chauffeurs. His father, a wealthy businessman, was, says Mr. Horowitz, "a fixer for Harold Wilson." What that means exactly is unclear — "My father was a very secretive man," he says— so an aura of suspicion and mystery surrounds both the word and the man. As unlikely as it might seem, Anthony's father, threatened with bankruptcy, withdrew all of his money from Swiss bank accounts in Zurich and deposited it in another account under a false name and then promptly died. His mother searched unsuccessfully for years in attempt to find the money, but it was never found. That too shaped Anthony's view of things. Today he says, "I think the only thing to do with money is spend it." His mother, whom he adored, eccentrically gave him a human skull for his 13th birthday. His grandmother, another Dickensian character, was mean-spirited and malevolent, a destructive force in his life. She was, he says, "a truly evil person", his first and worst arch villain. "My sister and I danced on her grave when she died," he now recalls.

A miserably unhappy and overweight child, Anthony had nowhere to turn for solace. "Family meals," he recalls, "had calories running into the thousands…. I was an astoundingly large, round child…." At the age of eight he was sent off to boarding school, a standard practice of the times and class in which he was raised. While being away from home came as an enormous relief, the school itself, Orley Farm, was a grand guignol horror with a headmaster who flogged the boys till they bled. "Once the headmaster told me to stand up in assembly and in front of the whole school said, 'This boy is so stupid he will not be coming to Christmas games tomorrow.' I have never totally recovered." To relieve his misery and that of the other boys, he not unsurprisingly made up tales of astounding revenge and retribution.

So how did an unhappy boy, from a privileged background, metamorphose into the creator of Alex Rider, fourteen-year-old spy for Britain's MI6? Although his childhood permanently damaged him, it also gave him a gift — it provided him with rich source material for his writing career. He found solace in boyhood in the escapism of the James Bond films, he says. He claims that his two sons now watch the James Bond films with the same tremendous enjoyment he did at their age. Bond's glamour translates perfectly to the 14-year-old psyche, the author says. "Bond had his cocktails, the car and the clothes. Kids are just as picky. It's got to be the right Nike trainers (sneakers), the right skateboard. And I genuinely think that 14-year-olds are the coolest people on the planet. It's this wonderful, golden age, just on the cusp of manhood when everything seems possible."

He writes in a comfortable shed in his garden for up to ten hours per day. In addition to the highly successful Alex Rider books, he has also written episodes of several popular TV crime series, including Poirot, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders and Murder Most Horrid. He has written a television series Foyle's War, which recently aired in the United States, and he has written the libretto of a Broadway musical adapted from Dr. Seuss's book, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. His film script The Gathering has just finished production. And…oh yes…there are more Alex Rider novels in the works. Anthony has also written the Diamond Brothers series.

Jon Howells

I have worked for Ottakar's since 1989, save for a brief sojourn with the Metropolitan Police, working in bookstores around the country before moving to the chain's Head Office in 2002.  I write columns for www.ottakars.co.uk and for the trade magazine The Bookseller, and enjoy reading across a wide spectrum, with recent favourites including Dissolution by CJ Sansom, Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs, and Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. The worst book I ever read was The Da Vinci Code. I'm married, with a five year old daughter, Pollyanna.

Simon Kernick

Simon Kernick is one of crime fiction's rising young stars. His first two books, The Business of Dying and The Murder Exchange were rapturously received; his dark humour, clever plotting and realistic storytelling striking a truly contemporary note. He lives with his wife and children near London.  

In 1930, when Agatha Christie wrote The Murder at the Village, there were 5866 incidents of  violent crime in the UK. In 1970, the year of Get Carter, there were 139,000. In 2001, there were 813,000. Crime in the UK has been completely transformed both in its levels and in its nature. And Simon Kernick thinks that it is important that at least some of the UK’s crime fiction reflects this reality:

‘I don’t think that crime fiction should be seen to glorify violence,’ Kernick comments. ‘But reflecting some of the reality helps to give an insight into a situation for which bald statistics don't give an adequate picture, and in years to come will provide people with an idea of what the crime situation was like at the turn of the millennium in Britain. If you want to escape from the woes of the world, there are still plenty of books out there for you. But I see the future of crime fiction as continuing to reflect this violent reality.’

Mark Lawson

Mark Lawson presents the arts programme Front Row on BBC Radio 4 and Newsnight Review on BBC 2. He is a columnist and a crime fiction reviewer for The Guardian and has published three novels: Bloody Margaret, Idlewild and Going Out Live.

Angus Marshall

Angus Marshall has been working in Forensic Computing since 2001 when he became a part-time advisor to the Digital Evidence Recovery and Internet Crime unit of North Yorkshire Trading Standards. As a professional geek, he maintains several computer networks - none of which have been hacked recently, despite daily attempts. He has written and presented papers on cybercrime and has been engaged by police forces to assist with major enquiries where digital evidence has been crucial to the invesitagation.

Michael Marshall is a novelist and screenwriter.  Born in England in 1965, he spent much of his childhood in America, South Africa and Australia, before his family returned to the UK.  He went to Kings College, Cambridge to study Philosophy and Social and Political Science, where he was a contemporary of Sam Mendes, David Baddiel and Tim Firth. He was heavily involved with the Cambridge Footlights, and went on to form a comedy group called And Now, In Colour... who wrote and performed for BBC Radio 4. 

He worked in graphic design and wrote corporate videos before becoming a full-time novelist in 1995.  His first novel, Only Forward, won two major literary awards. His second, Spares, is currently under option at Paramount - after originally being optioned by Stephen Spielberg's DreamWorks SKG. His third, One Of Us, was optioned by Warner Brothers.

Michael is currently engaged in the development of original television and movie projects, and six of his short stories are currently being adapted for television by London production company, Little Bird. He lives with his herbalist wife Paula and two cats, in North London and Brighton.

Stuart MacBride

Stuart MacBride has scrubbed toilets offshore, flunked out of university, set up his own graphic design company, worked for some really nasty marketing people, got dragged into the heady world of the internet, developed massive applications for the oil industry, drunk heaps of wine and created the perfect recipe for mushroom soup. He lives, just left of the back of beyond, in North-east Scotland with his wife Fiona and enough potatoes to feed an army. Cold Granite is his first novel. 

Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith is Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and a novelist. He is the author of a variety of books including most recently, the Prescious Ramotswe series of novels, the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency, which is set in Botswana. He is also the author of books on criminal law including, as co-editor and co-author, Forensic Aspects of Sleep.

Val McDermid

Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community, then read English at Oxford.  She was a journalist for 16 years starting out in the south-west on the Plymouth and South Devon Times and Sunday Independent, where she was a prize-winning Trainee Journalist.  She was a regular broadcaster for the local Plymouth radio stations and Hospital Radio.  From 1977 to 1979 she was a news reporter on the Scottish Daily Record and worked for Gay News on a freelance basis as feature writer and theatre critic.  Journalism then took her to Manchester, to The People.  From 1988 until 1991 she was Northern Bureau Chief.

Val has written for the stage and radio and contributed to a short story anthology.  Her first foray into the crime world was with the publication of Report for Murder in 1987, followed by Common Murder, Final Edition and in 1993 Union Jack.  These four crime books were all published by the Women’s Press.

Kate Brannigan made her debut in 1992, in Dead Beat, followed by Kick Back, and  Kate has subsequently been published in the USA, Germany, Holland, Sweden and France.  Crack Down was published in 1994, and was subsequently shortlisted for the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association (C.W.A) Gold Dagger Award;  Star Struck, the sixth novel to feature the Manchester private eye, was awarded the French Grand Prix des Romans D’Aventure in 1998.

Val McDermid is the highly acclaimed author of The Mermaids Singing and The Wire in the Blood, tense psychological thrillers featuring criminal profiler Tony Hill.  The Mermaids Singing won the 1995 gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year and A Place of Execution won both the Anthony Award for best novel and the Los Angeles Times 2001 Book of the year Year Award.  A major ITV series based on her books was broadcast in 2002, to great acclaim, with Robson Green playing the lead role.   She has also written a non-fiction book, A Suitable Job For a Woman: Inside the World of Female Private Eyes.  Val McDermid lives near Manchester.

Jenni Murray

Jenni Murray is one of radio and television's most respected broadcasters, perhaps best known for Radio 4's Woman's Hour. Jenni is the author of The Woman's Hour, A History of Women since World war II and Is it Me or is it Hot in Here? Her latest book That's my boy! was published last year.

Malcolm Pryce

Malcolm Pryce was born in Shrewsbury, brought up in Aberystwyth and now lives in Bangkok. Following stints as a BMW assembly-line worker and as the world’s worst aluminium salesman he worked in London in advertising for a while, before quitting his job to go travelling.

He spent the first six months wandering around the islands of French Polynesia working as a deckhand on a yacht. After that he settled in the Far East where he wrote tourist promotional literature for the former headhunters of Borneo and advertising copy for Singapore Airlines. His first taste of literary success came with the airline’s in-cabin children’s colouring book Archibald and the Cheese.

Emboldened by this achievement, he quit his job to write Aberystwyth Mon Amour. The first draft was completed on a cargo ship bound for South America. He has no plans to return to Blighty until they improve the weather and the trains.

His new novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth, will be published by Bloomsbury in April 2005.

Stuart Pawson

Stuart Pawson had a career as a mining engineer, followed by a spell working for the probation service, before he became a full-time writer.  He lives in Fairburn, Yorkshire, and when not hunched over the word processor, Stuart likes nothing more than tramping across the moors, which often feature in his stories. Over the Edge is the tenth novel to feature Detective Inspector Charlie Priest.

Ruth Rendell

Ruth Rendell has won many awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon in My View; a second Edgar in 1984 from the Mystery Writers of America for the best short story, The New Girl Friend; a Gold Dagger award for Live Flesh in 1986. She was also the winner of the 1990 Sunday Times Literary award, as well as the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.

Paul Routledge

Paul Routledge is no stranger to stratagems. He has covered conspiracies – and cock-ups – in the palace of Westminster for the past thirteen years, as a political correspondent for The Observer and the Independent on Sunday, and latterly as a columnist on the Daily Mirror.

His books on leading politicians also exposed the plots, spats and intrigues in the New Labour government, beginning with a controversial biography of Gordon Brown, which set the agenda for the years of Brown v Blair machinations.  He also revealed the scandal of Peter Mandelson’s secret home loan, which cost the Cabinet minister his job. His biography of Airey Neave, the Tory MP and Colditz escaper who engineered Margaret Thatcher’s leadership victory, laid bare an  assassination plot in the House of Commons and the ruthless reaction of the security services.

He appears weekly in the Daily Mirror, fortnightly in Tribune, occasionally in other magazines and when in the right mood on radio and television.  Routledge, aged 61, lives in the “industrial dale” – Airedale, but makes regular punitive expeditions to Westminster, where his eight-year-old conspiracy of words to get rid of Tony Blair shows (as yet) little sign of succeeding.

John Sandford

John Sandford was born in 1944, and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  For seven years he worked as a general assignment reporter for the Miami Herald, covering killings and drug cases.  In 1978, he joined the St Paul Pioneer Press as a feature reporter, where he worked for twelve years.  In 1986, he won the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles he wrote on the farm crisis in the Midwest.   He is the author of sixteen PREY novels, featuring Lucas Davenport, and four KIDD novels.  John Sandford now lives in Minnesota.

Christopher Sansom

C.J. Sansom was educated at Birmingham University, where he took a BA and then a Ph.D. in History.  After working in a variety of jobs he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex, until becoming a full-time writer. Following on from his remarkable debut, Dissolution, Dark Fire is the second novel in his Shardlake series. He lives in Sussex. 

Catherine Sampson

Catherine Sampson started her career in the BBC and has worked as Beijing correspondent for The Times. She now lives in Beijing with her husband and three children. Catherine's second novel, Out of Mind, will be published in August 2005 and follows her remarkable debut, Falling off Air.

Kjersti Scheen

Kjersti Scheen was born in Oslo in 1943.  She is educated at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oslo and has been illustrating books sine 1964. She published her first book in 1976, a picture book entitled FIE AND THE DARKNESS and has since published a wide selection of books for children, juveniles and adults.  Her talent for understanding and communicating with the the young readers has given her many prizes. Her first novel for adults,  SPRING MOON, was published in 1986, and might well be labelled  a "find yourself" novel.  When FINAL CURTAIN was published in 1994 introducing Margaret Moss as the Private Eye,  it received a warm welcome from the critics and readers alike, and made an excellent entrée.

Cath Staincliffe

Cath Staincliffe’s debut novel was short-listed for the Crime Writers Association’s John Creasey Award for best first crime novel and her work has also been serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour.  She lives in Manchester, the background for many of her best-selling stories, with her partner and their three children.

Laura Susijn

Laura Susijn was born in Holland in 1967and educated in the UK. After several years spent studying philosophy in England and then abroad she returned to London in 1993 to work at the Fourth Estate publishing company, selling rights. A few years later she moved to Sheil Land Literary Agency as rights director. In 1998 she started her own literary agency, The Susijn Agency Ltd, representing writers from around the world."

Callum Sutherland

I have been in the Metropolitan Police for just over 28 years. The majority of my career has been in the CID both as a Detective Constable and for the last 21 years as a Detective Sergeant. In the main I have worked on division dealing with serious crime such as murder, rape, serious assaults, fraud and burglary. In 1992 with the formation of dedicated murder squads I joined a South East London Unit where it was not uncommon to investigate eight to ten murders a year. I have always had an interest in crime scene analysis, interpretation and the forensic sciences and often performed the role of exhibits officer when attached to the murder squad. 

In 1998 I became a Crime Scene Manager covering murder, attempted murder, serial, serious and suspicious crime scenes in the South London area. I am also currently involved in delivering Crime Scene Investigation training in South Africa for their Independant Complaints Directorate. I also deliver training and lecture for the Metropolitan Police and Forensic Science Service's  and at various Universities and Law establishments in the United Kingdom.

Edwin Thomas

Edwin Thomas was born in 1977 and grew up in West Germany, Belgium and America before returning to England to study history at Lincoln College, Oxford. The first instalment of the adventures of Martin Jerrold, The Blighted Cliffs was runner-up in the prestigious 2001 Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger award for new fiction and is available in Bantam paperback. Edwin Thomas lives in London.  

Ilona Van Mil

Born in the Netherlands, Ilona van Mil grew up in Ontario, Canada and read English at the University of Waterloo.  She married and moved to England where she has lived ever since, apart from a brief period in Paris.  She has worked as a journalist, both on local newspapers and freelance, and has written short stories, some of which have been published and broadcast.  Having studied Law at the University of Essex she now teaches Land Law and writes.  Her leisure activities include sailing and riding.  She won the Crime Writers’ Association Debut Dagger in 2002 for Sugarmilk Falls.

Vivian White

Vivian White is a reporter on "Panorama," a job which has, recently, taken him to Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, for a film about the detainees kept  there ("Inside Guantanamo"); he has interviewed young British Muslim women about why they choose to wear the hijab ("Covering Up"); and he has spent many weeks visiting a hospital in Bedford to find out what it feels like working for the NHS under New Labour. He has previously been a presenter of the BBC's Sunday political programme This Week, Next Week, and presented political programmes from Westminster. He has worked as a reporter for Channel 4's A Week in Politics, and as a political correspondent for Granada Television. Before that he was a radio reporter, industrial editor, and presenter, for LBC / IRN.  At LBC he remembers well reading Ruth Rendell's A Judgement in Stone, and then interviewing her. Ever since he has been a huge Ruth Rendell fan.

Jane Wood

After reading English at Cambridge, Jane Wood began her publishing career as assistant to Barley Alison at The Alison Press, an imprint of Secker & Warburg.  She became an editor at Secker, before moving in 1987 to Arrow as editorial director.  Three years later she moved back to hardback publishing at Macmillan, before taking up her current post at Orion where she has been publishing director of Orion Fiction for ten years.  Recently she became editor-in-chief of Orion Fiction in order to go back to her first love which is editing.