Kate Ellis

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 seven 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 also written an historical trilogy set in the aftermath of the First World War. 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 Killing Place and the latest in her Joe Plantagenet series is Walking by Night. The final book in her trilogy set in the North West of England shortly after World War One is The House of the Hanged Woman which is now out in paperback.