I live, presently, in a suburb of north-west London - the area, roughly speaking, in which I've spent much of my life - with my husband, Jonathan, and our one-year-old miniature wire-haired dachshund.  

Not too much to tell on the education years.   I liked day-dreaming more than concentration, adored reading fiction for pleasure, but found it a chore to write an essay, and escaped school at the earliest opportunity, keen to try my hand at what I loved most:  acting.  Drama productions had always been the high spots for me at school - but out in the professional world, I came to the decision that an actor's life was not for me after all, and targeted another goal:   working on the “other side” in drama production at the BBC.

The Radio Drama Department was a glorious place to work in the seventies, peopled by amazing talents and personalities.  Off and on, over a period of almost fifteen years, I worked on a great variety of plays and serials ( including The Forsyte Saga and War and Peace ), leaving the BBC now and again to travel, falling in love with New York and living and working there for a while.  When London's Capital Radio formed a small drama department in the early eighties, I spent three years working beside Anthony Cornish at the Duke of York's Theatre - marvellous times, great memories, working with the likes of David Jason, Jane Lapotaire, David Suchet, John Alderton, Pauline Collins, Bill Nighy and George Baker - though by that time, I had finally discovered what I really wanted to do.

It had begun, a real bolt out of the blue, when I'd woken up one morning with a startlingly powerful urge to write a novel.  It took more than five years of hard work, typing away at night and weekends off, rewriting repeatedly, knowing enough about the intensity of competition to realize the necessity of making it the absolutely best job I was capable of.   In Love and Friendship was published in 1986, first in the UK , then in the US , making the New York Times bestseller list , many other countries following – and what a great pleasure it was, and remains, to hear from readers in different parts of the world.

Chateau Ella came next, and I continued writing sagas, each one increasingly suspenseful (body-counts growing ever greater) until I decided to make the break and try my hand at thriller writing.  If I Should Die was a medical thriller, followed by Too Close, a psychological suspense.  Which is where I've remained, my books these days found on the crime shelves, my work translated into seventeen languages, with one of my most successful markets now in Germany - though my latest title, RALPH’S CHILDREN, is located in the UK, and the Sam Becket thrillers are Florida based.

I think I assumed that if I was still writing twenty-two years after my first novel was published, writing would be easier, but apart from those brief moments of magic when the words flow, it’s still a tough slog most of the time – though I wouldn’t swap it for any other job. You have to be disciplined to be a writer, but that’s never come naturally to me – yet somehow, here I am writing my twentieth!