Ann Cleeves

Before any of the novels, Ann Cleeves cooked at the bird observatory on Fair Isle, served as an auxiliary coastguard and spent years as a probation officer, having dropped out of an English degree at Sussex. The Crow Trap (1999) brought in Vera Stanhope, a large, shabby, short-tempered detective inspector working the Northumberland hills, who also carries Silent Voices (2011), The Darkest Evening (2020) and The Rising Tide (2022), and whom Brenda Blethyn has played on ITV since 2011. Cleeves created Jimmy Perez of the Shetland books as well, and Matthew Venn, the North Devon detective of The Long Call (2019), who investigates on the estuary he grew up beside after leaving a strict religious community. Raven Black won the Crime Writers' Association's top novel award in 2006, and the association gave her its Diamond Dagger in 2017. Herefordshire-born, she lives in Whitley Bay.