Richard La Plante

Richard La Plante is an American-born author of martial-arts-inflected thriller and adventure fiction, born in 1948 in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. His novels, including Mantis, Leopard, and Mind Kill, and the Tegné and Fogarty-Tanaka series, combine crime and adventure plotting with close attention to combat sports and Eastern martial disciplines. He was married to the British screenwriter and novelist Lynda La Plante, creator of Prime Suspect, from 1979 until their divorce in 1996. His other books include Warlord of Zendow, The Killing Blow, Steroid Blues, and First Born, spanning thrillers and adventure fiction rooted in the martial-arts world he writes about. Across a bibliography of more than a dozen titles, La Plante has returned repeatedly to protagonists whose combat training shapes how they solve crimes and survive violent conspiracies.