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Patricia Hall is the pen-name of former journalist Maureen O’Connor, who lives in Oxford. She has written twelve crime novels set in her native West Yorkshire, in the fictional town of Bradfield which is not a million miles from Bradford. The latest, Death in Dark Waters, was published by Allison and Busby in 1002 and Skeleton at the Feast and Deep Freeze are out in paperback. Dead Reckoning was published in August 2003, together with the paperback edition of Death in Dark Waters. She is also published in the USA by St Martins Press and translated into several European languages. Her books are set in a post-industrial, multi-cultural scene where her heroine, Laura Ackroyd, is a reporter on the local newspaper with closer links than are always comfortable to a dour DCI in the Bradfield force, Michael Thackeray. Her books frequently pick up contemporary issues in a rapidly changing urban area on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales where cultures and traditions often collide. Her characters’ excursions have taken them, in different books, to Docklands in London, and Oxford college and to Paris. Patricia Hall was born and brought up in Bradford and although she now lives on Morse territory in Oxford, she visits her native heath regularly to visit family, and keeps a close eye on the changing scene. Maureen was educated at Bradford Girls’ Grammar School where she was, according to one of her old school friends, “the bolshie one”. She went on to the University of Birmingham where she read English and edited the student newspaper. A a journalist, she worked for the Guardian, the BBC and the Independent, writing and broadcasting mainly about education. Her first crime novel was published in 1991 and she has now retired from journalism to devote herself to fiction full-time. She is a “political animal” though not currently a member of any political party. She was chair of governors of her sons’ comprehensive school when they were students there and still takes an interest in local issues. She is married to an academic and has two grown-up sons. Further information on the Web at http://www.patriciahall.co.uk |
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