Stephen Leather

Stephen Leather is an English thriller writer, born in Manchester in 1956 and educated at Manchester Grammar School and the University of Bath, where he studied biochemistry. He worked for more than a decade as a journalist -- for the Glasgow Herald, the Daily Mirror, The Times, the Daily Mail, and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong -- before selling his first novel, Pay Off, in 1987. He is best known for two long-running series: the Dan "Spider" Shepherd novels, following an undercover former SAS soldier, and the Jack Nightingale books, which follow a police negotiator turned private investigator into supernatural territory. Several of his thrillers have been shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. In 2011 he was ranked the second-bestselling author on the UK Kindle store, behind only Lee Child, and was named one of the 100 most influential people in British publishing.