Kate Ellis

Sub-genre: detective, Historical thriller, Police procedural

Kate Ellis was born and brought up in Liverpool and studied drama in Manchester. She is married with two grown up sons and lives in North Cheshire. She worked in teaching, marketing and accountancy, none of which she particularly enjoyed, before discovering that writing crime fiction was what she’d wanted to do all along!

Before ‘turning to crime’ she first enjoyed literary success as winner of the North West Playwrights Competition in 1990. Her keen interest in history and archaeology features strongly in her books. Described by The Times as ‘a beguiling author who interweaves past and present’ she has written twenty three novels featuring black archaeology graduate, DI Wesley Peterson and his Liverpool-born boss DCI Gerry Heffernan and five crime novels with a supernatural twist featuring DI Joe Plantagenet – as well as a standalone historical mystery, The Devil’s Priest, set in Tudor Liverpool, which is now available on Kindle. Kate has recently commenced a new historical trilogy set in the aftermath of the First World War and the second in the series has recently been published.  She also writes short stories and has been shortlisted twice for the CWA Short Story Dagger and for a Barry Award in the USA. In 2017.

Kate was elected as a member of the Detection Club in 2014 and was awarded the CWA Dagger in the Library in 2019.

Her latest Wesley Peterson novel is The Burial Circle and her latest in the Joe Plantagenet series is Walking by Night. Her final book in the trilogy set in the aftermath of the First World War is The House of the Hanged Woman which was published in November 2020.

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Daggers

Library - CWA Dagger in the Library winner 2019
Diamond

Other Awards

The Plague Maiden nominated for the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year award.

Two short stories shortlisted for the CWA Short Story Dagger.

A further story shortlisted for a Barry Award.

Books by Kate Ellis

• The Mechanical Devil

  

• A High Mortallty of Doves

  

• The Mermaid's Scream

  

• The House of Eyes

  

• The Death Season

  

• Playing with Bones

  

• The Blood Pit

  

• A Perfect Death

  

• The Flesh Tailor

  

• Kissing The Demons

  

• The Jackal Man

  

• Watching The Ghosts

  

• The Cadaver Game

  

• The Shadow Collector

  

• The Shroud Maker

  

• The Burial Circle

  

• The House of the Hanged Woman

  

• Walking by Night