Authors: Crime and Thriller

Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind The Scenes At The Museum. Her four bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs. Her 2013 novel Life After Life won the South Bank Sky Arts Literature Prize, was shortlisted for the Women's Prize, voted Book ...

Lee Child was born in 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a...

Thirty years ago Tom Clancy was a Maryland insurance broker with a passion for naval history. Years before, he had been an English major at Baltimore's Loyola College and had always dreamed of writing a novel. His first effort, The Hunt for Red October, sold briskly as a result of rave reviews, then catapulted onto the New York Times bestseller list after President Reagan...

With over 50 million books in print worldwide, Harlan Coben’s last six consecutive novels, SIX YEARS, STAY CLOSE, LIVE WIRE, CAUGHT, LONG LOST and HOLD TIGHT all debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and lists around the world.  His first Young Adult novel SHELTER was just released in paperback, and the second in the Mickey Bolitar series, SECONDS AWAY, was ...

Martina Cole is the No. 1 bestselling author of eighteen hugely successful novels. Her most recent, THE FAMILY, went straight to No. 1 on the Sunday Times hardback bestseller list and was the bestselling hardback adult fiction title of 2010 and was a No. 1 bestseller in paperback. THE TAKE, which won the British Book Award for Crime Thriller of the Year in 2006, was adapted for Sky One, as...

A former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Connelly is the author of the Harry Bosch thriller series as well as several stand-alone bestsellers, including the highly acclaimed legal thriller, The Lincoln Lawyer.

Michael Connelly has been President of the Mystery Writers of America. His books have been translated into 31 languages and have won awards all over the...

Patricia Cornwell sold her first novel, Postmortem, while working as a computer analyst at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. At her first signing, held during a lunch break from the morgue, Patricia sold no copies of Postmortem and fielded exactly one question – an elderly woman asked her where she could find the cookbooks

Postmortem would go on to win the...

Clive Cussler, the Grand Master of Adventure, grew up in Alhambra, California.
He later attended Pasadena City College for two years, but then enlisted in the Air Force during the Korean War where he served as an aircraft mechanic and flight engineer in the Military Air Transport Service. Upon his discharge, he became a copywriter and later creative director for two leading ad agencies. At...

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time in LaLa Land. La la Land is like an out-of-body experience –while your mouth is eating lunch your mind is conversing with Captain Kirk. Sometimes I’d pretend to sing opera. My mother would send me to the grocery store down the street, and off I’d go, caterwauling at the top of my lungs. Before the opera thing I went through a horse stage...

Gillian Flynn was born in Kansas City, Missouri to two community-college professors—her mother taught reading; her father, film. Thus she spent an inordinate amount of her youth nosing through books and watching movies. She has happy memories of having A Wrinkle in Time pried from her hands at the dinner table, and also of seeing Alien, Psycho and Bonnie and...

The fifth of seven children, Vince Flynn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1966. He graduated from the St. Thomas Academy in 1984, and the University of St. Thomas with a degree in economics in 1988.

After college he went to work for Kraft General Foods where he was an account and sales marketing specialist.

In 1990 he left Kraft to accept an aviation candidate slot with the United States ...

Sue Grafton is published in 28 countries and 26 languages—including Estonian, Bulgarian, and Indonesian. She's an international bestseller with a readership in the millions. She's a writer who believes in the form that she has chosen to mine: "The mystery novel offers a world in which justice is served. Maybe not in a court of law," she has said, "but people do get...

Kerry Greenwood was born in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray and after wandering far and wide, she returned to live there. She has a degree in English and Law from Melbourne University and was admitted to the legal profession on the 1st April 1982, a day which she finds both soothing and significant. Kerry has written twenty novels, a number of plays, including The Troubadours with...

John Grisham’s books have been translated into 42 languages and published worldwide. His legal thrillers have enthralled fans since 1987 and many have become hit movies, such as The Pelican Brief and A Time To Kill.

Mary Theresa Eleanor Higgins, better known as Mary Higgins Clark is the bestselling American author of suspense novels. All her 24 novels have been chartbusters, selling more than 80 million copies as of 2007 in the United States only. She was born in the Bronx, New York on December 24, 1929. Her parents were Irish immigrants who ran a pub which eventually had to be shut down by the time Higgins...

#1 New York Times bestselling author Tami Hoag began her writing career at the age of nine with the self-published, self-illustrated third-grade hit Black Pony.  The school project—a tale of two children sharing a pony named Smoky—sparked Hoag’s love for storytelling, and set her on a collision course with destiny, which would be reached in 1988 with Bantam...