Priscilla Masters
Sub-genre: Female police procedural
Priscilla Masters was born in 1952 in Halifax, Yorkshire and adopted at the age of six weeks by an orthopaedic surgeon and his Classics graduate wife. One of seven multi-racial adopted children she is number 3! Aged sixteen she moved to Birmingham, qualifying as a registered nurse at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in 1973 finally working as a respiratory specialist nurse at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.
A lifelong fan of crime novels she began writing in the mid 1980’s in response to a challenge made by an aunt asking her what she intended doing with the rest of her life. She borrowed a typewriter the next day. In 1994 the first of her DI Joanna Piercy novels, Winding up the Serpent, was published by Pan Macmillan, Since then she has had 14 Joanna Piercy novels published and is currently working on her 15th,, working title, Almost a Whisper, set around The Roaches and the moorlands town of Leek.
She has also written 7 novels set in Shropshire featuring Shrewsbury Coroner Martha Gunn and a series featuring a forensic psychiatrist, Dr Claire Roget which are set in the city of Stoke on Trent. And a number of medical standalones which deal with such issues as the blurred line between sanity and insanity, the arrogance of a surgeon and the difficulties faced by a female G.P.
She has retired from nursing and has two sons, a daughter in law and two grandsons.