Jane Renshaw

Jane Renshaw copy edits scientific and medical journals, having concluded early on that research science was not for her, and writes crime fiction alongside that work. She works in rural north-east Scotland, in her parents' cottage, and the area shapes her fiction, most plainly in the Pitfourie novels she publishes herself, which begin with The Sweetest Poison. Watch Over Me, issued by Inkubator Books in January 2020, follows Flora and Neil, a childless couple who adopt a little girl named Beckie and then have to reckon with the violent family she was taken from. The Stepson stays on the same domestic ground, with narrators whose versions of events cannot all be true. Renshaw has said plotting is the hardest part of the job for her, and that she settles it with her editor before drafting. Her other thrillers include No Place Like Home, The Child Who Never Was and The Lost Boy.