Contemporary Authors

PERSONAL

Born 1958, in London, England.

Brighton University, B.A., 1981; Sussex University, M.A.

ADDRESS

• Home - East Sussex and Gloucestershire, England.
• Agent - Laura Palmer Editorial Director, Head of Zeus, First Floor East, 5-8 Hardwick Street, London EC1R 4RG, England.

CAREER

Writer; guest tutor, West Dean M.A. program in creative writing and publishing.

City Limits top-ten books of the year, 1987, for Seven Miles from Sydney;People’s Book prize, 2010, for A Kind of Vanishing.

WRITINGS

• Seven Miles from Sydney (novel), HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. (London, England), 1987
• A Kind of Vanishing (novel), Myriad Editions (Brighton, England), 2007
• "THE DETECTIVE'S DAUGHTER" SERIES; MYSTERY NOVELS
• The Detective's Daughter, Head of Zeus (London, England), 2014
• Ghost Girl, Head of Zeus (London, England), 2014
• The Detective's Secret, Head of Zeus (London, England), 2015
• The House with No Rooms, Head of Zeus (London, England), 2016
• The Dog Walker, Head of Zeus (London, England), 2017
• The Death Chamber, Head of Zeus (London, England), 2018

Also author of The Runaway: A Detective’s Daughter Short Story, Head of Zeus (London, England), 2015. Contributor to Hold onto the Messy Times by Sue Johnston.

SIDELIGHTS

Born in London, British writer Lesley Thomson is the best-selling author of acclaimed mystery novels, including her popular “The Detective’s Daughter” series. Thomson graduated from Brighton University in 1981 and spent the next several years in Australia, working at odd jobs while she focused on her writing career.  She later returned to England, where she continued write fiction and completed an M.A. in English literature at Sussex University. Thomson’s first novel, Seven Miles from Sydney, was published in 1987. It was named one of the top ten books of the year in City Limits.

A Kind of Vanishing

A Kind of Vanishing, a story of a child’s unsolved disappearance, received glowing reviews and established Thomson’s reputation as mystery writer. In the summer of 1968, two young girls are playing hide-and-seek together when one of them vanishes. Eleanor Ramsay tells police investigators that she has no idea how Alice had disappeared, or where she might have gone. But as it turns out, Eleanor knows more than she wants to share. Alice, the pampered only child of wealthy parents, had discovered a troubling secret about Eleanor’s working-class mother, and was taunting the Eleanor with this information just before she had vanished.

In a parallel narrative set thirty years later, Eleanor’s father suddenly dies and a forty-year-old woman named Alice Kennedy comes to his funeral. No one knows who she is or why she is there. It falls to Alice’s teenage daughter Chris to work out the mystery of her mother’s past–and reveal dark secrets about the Ramsay family. Reviewers expressed great admiration for the novel and commented that Thomson’s talent places her among mystery luminaries such as Ian Rankin and Kate Atkinson. A Kind of Vanishing won the 2010 People’s Book Prize for fiction.

The Detective's Daughter

The legacy of an infamous unsolved murder case sets the context for The Detective’s Daughter, the first of a series of novels featuring Stella Darnell. Kate Rokesmith’s murder in 1981 had made headlines, and had become an unhealthy obsession for the police investigator assigned to the case, Detective Terence (Terry) Darnell. The inspector had given everything to the case, neglecting his own young daughter and wrecking his marriage, but had never been able to charge anyone for the crime. Haunted by this failure, Terry had continued working on the case in secret, even after his retirement from the police force.

Thirty years after Rokesmith’s murder, Terry suffers a fatal heart attack. When Stella begins clearing out his house she finds his notes on the Rokesmith case, kept meticulously over decades, and they force her to change everything she had come to believe about her father and his work. The man she had seen as a distant and uninvolved father, she discovers, had been a complex man worthy of appreciation and respect. Feeling compelled to honor her father somehow, Stella decides to find out what she can about Rokesmith and her death. In this task, which is ultimately successful, she receives help from Jack Harmon, an enigmatic employee of her cleaning company who is fascinated by patterns and claims to see ghosts. He is also not afraid to get into the mind of psychopathic killers and try to figure out how they think and what they might do next. 

Ghost Girl and The Detective's Secret

The series continues with Ghost Girl, in which another of Terry’s old police files inspires Stella to investigate. The file contains seven photographs showing empty streets, and it is not immediately obvious to Stella why her father had kept them. Looking into the mystery, she learns that one photo was taken in 1966 on the day that a young girl witnessed a traumatic event. In investigating the mystery, Stella and Jack discover a tenuous connection with the infamous Moors murderers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who had sexually assaulted and killed five children near Manchester, England, in the early 1960s. Reviewing the novel in Booklist, Karen Keefe said that the story takes time to unspool, but added that Thomson handles the narrative tension well and convinces readers that a “thumping good reveal . . . [is] worth the wait.”

In The Detective’s Secret, a man is found dead beneath a metro London train. His brother believes he was murdered, and hires Stella and Jack to investigate the case. But Jack, who works nights as a subway train driver, thinks it more likely that the man committed suicide. As Stella deals with family matters, including the surprise information that she has a brother, Jack moves into a west London water tower that is being renovated and turned into apartments. A decomposed corpse is found in the building, assumed to be the body of a man seen having sex at the water tower in 1987 with a woman who slammed the door behind her afterward, trapping him inside. Clues about the train death point to a connection with the death in the water tower.

The House with No Rooms and The Dog Walker

As Stella works on a new case in The House with No Rooms, much of which is set in London’s Kew Gardens, she discovers links to an unsolved murder from 1976. In The Dog Walker, a frustrated husband asks Stella and Jack to find out what had happened to his wife, Helen Honeysett, who had disappeared on a winter night twenty-nine years earlier while jogging with her dog along the Thames river towpath. The dog returned home, but Helen’s body had never been found, and police had been unable to offer any answers.

As they begin seeking clues, Stella and Jack discover that no one who lives near that remote section of the towpath is willing to talk. The fact that so much time has elapsed makes matters more difficult. The investigation hinges on who was walking a dog that night, but many pet dogs have come and gone since Helen’s disappearance, and it is all but impossible to identify the relevant animal and its walker. A writer for Publishers Weekly, describing the book as “busy,” observed that the plot and its numerous secondary characters can be difficult to keep track of, but ventured that some readers would appreciate its dark atmospherics.

BIOCRIT

PERIODICALS

• Booklist, October 15, 2015, Karen Keefe, review of Ghost Girl, p. 21.

• Bookseller, January 17 2014, review of Ghost Girl, p. 33.

• Publishers Weekly, May 15, 2017, review of The Dog Walker.

ONLINE

• Lesley Thomson Website, https://lesleythomson.co.uk (February 7, 2018).