Picture: Mark Bothwell

Some basic facts. My novels have been translated into a wide range of languages, from Italian to Japanese, and my debut work, Semana Santa, set in Holy Week Spain, was filmed with Mira Sorvino.

I was born in Yorkshire in 1953 and left school at the age of seventeen to work as a cub reporter on one of the smallest evening newspapers in the country in Scarborough. Eight years later I was a staff reporter on The Times in London, covering news, business and latterly working as arts correspondent. I worked on the launch of the Independent and was a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times for a decade before giving up journalism entirely in 2005 to focus on writing fiction.

Semana Santa won the WH Smith Fresh Talent award for one of the best debut novels of the year in 1996 and was later made into a movie starring Mira Sorvino and Olivier Martinez. Four standalone works followed before A Season for the Dead, the first in a series set in Italy. The titles are published in numerous languages around the world including Chinese and Japanese… and Italian.

I’ve featured regularly on the speaker lists of leading international book events, including the Melbourne and Ottawa writers’ festivals, the Harrogate Crime Festival, Thrillerfest, Bouchercon and Left Coast Crime. I’ve taught at writing schools around the world, notably at the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in Corte Madera, California, where I’ve worked alongside writers such as Martin Cruz Smith and Michael Connelly.

In 2006 I launched a campaigning web-site save-wye which was instrumental in a successful battle to prevent one of the largest environmental threats to the countryside of Kent in southern England. My non-fiction book on the campaign to defend Wye from development, Saved, was published in May 2007.

I live close to Wye, Kent.