Julia Crouch started her working life as a theatre director and playwright. She retrained as a graphic designer, setting up her own business, and later took an Open University Course in Creative Writing through which she discovered National Novel Writing Month. Her first published novel, the thriller Cuckoo, came out in 2011. This was followed by Every Vow I Break in 2012. Visit her website at juliacrouch.co.uk.

Elena Forbes grew up in London. After earning a degree in French and Italian from Bristol University, she worked in portfolio management for a number of international investment groups before becoming a full-time writer. Her series about Detective Inspector Mark Tartaglia began in 2007 with Die With Me. The latest in the series is Evil in Return (2010).

During a career at the Bar, working mostly in the field of criminal law, M R Hall tried to learn the craft of screen writing, eventually getting his first commission in television writing an episode of the ITV hit series Kavanagh QC. For over ten years Matthew has been a screen writer and producer, and has written over 40 hours of prime time drama for BBC1 and ITV. His debut novel, The Coroner, the first in the Jenny Copper series, was published by Pan Macmillan in 2009 and was nominated for the Crime Writer’s Association Gold Dagger in the best novel category. The latest book in the series, The Flight, was published in 2012. Visit his website here.

Christopher Wakling resigned from his City law job in London and headed to Australia, where he wrote his first novel looking at a beach. He returned to London from Australia where he wrote and published two more novels before moving to Bristol, just as the city was trying to figure out what to do about the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. This was the inspiration behind his novel The Devil’s Mask, which came out in paperback in the UK in 2012. It was written while he was the inaugural Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Bristol University. His novel What I Did was also published in paperback in 2012. Visit his website here.

Andrew Taylor writes mainly crime novels and historical novels. From 2004 to 2006, he edited The Author, the quarterly journal of the Society of Authors, and he continues to write The Author‘s regular ‘Grub Street’ column. He is the Spectator‘s crime fiction reviewer and also contributes reviews and features to the Independent and elsewhere. Visit his website at www.andrew-taylor.co.uk.