Angela Marsons

Brierley Hill in the Black Country gave Angela Marsons her setting, and years of rejection gave her the rest. Born in 1968, she spent a long stretch as a security guard at the Merry Hill Shopping Centre while publishers turned her manuscripts down for roughly a quarter of a century. The digital imprint Bookouture signed her in 2014, and Silent Scream, which introduced Detective Inspector Kim Stone, went to number one on Amazon UK almost at once. Lost Girls followed later that year, then Twisted Lies and Stolen Ones in 2021 and Deadly Fate in 2023, all of them planted in the same corner of the West Midlands. Marsons says her characters are invented rather than borrowed from people she knows. The crime books have sold several million copies across some thirty languages. If Only, from 2021, leaves Kim Stone behind for a comic story of three friends and their tangled love lives.