About Cara

So, the short version: I write crime thrillers. I love cats, champagne and chocolate, and my guilty pleasure is watching true crime on TV. I used to get teased about it but now I just smile and say ‘Research’…

Want to know a bit more? Well, I studied English at Oxford in the 1980s, and went back to do a doctorate in 2003. By that time I’d spent 15 years in business, first in the City, and later in PR for Guinness (now Diageo), and after that I worked as a freelance copywriter, which gave me a a lot of useful experience and a healthy respect for meeting deadlines.  

There are two achievements I’m most proud of in my life, and the first was to get to Oxford, having come from a state school and a family where no-one had even done A levels before. That’s why I have such a profound love for local libraries – we didn’t have a lot of books at home so my weekly visit to the library as a child was my lifeline, and a passport to another world. And without that access to books, and the love of reading they gave me, I would never have ended up at Oxford, either.

The second happened when I was doing that Guinness PR job. I created a worldwide humanitarian and environmental initiative called the ‘Water of Life’, named after the Gaelic phrase for whisky, uisge beatha (Guinness was then the largest producer of Scotch whisky in the world). Long after I left, the initiative is still going strong and has provided clean water for more than 5 million people in Africa in the last five years alone. I’m both proud and humbled by that.

I’m also really proud of my books. We all know how hard it is to get published, and you need a lot of perseverance and resilience—as well as patience! But it’s still the best job in the world—to have a stranger, maybe from the other side of the world, contact you on social media to say how much they love your book, there’s no feeling like it.