Christine Poulson

Before Christine Poulson turned to crime, she was a respectable academic with a PhD in History of Art and had written widely on nineteenth-century art and literature. Her book, The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840-1920 (Manchester University Press, 1999) was short-listed for a Mythopoeic Award for non-fiction. During her career as an art historian, she worked at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and at the William Morris Society at Kelmscott House, London. Later she was a lecturer in Art History at a college in Cambridge.

The city of Cambridge and the surrounding Fens, with their unique and sinister atmosphere, provided the setting for her first novel, Dead Letters, published in 2002, which featured literary historian and accidental sleuth, Cassandra James. Stage Fright, the second in the series, came out in 2003, and Footfall in 2006. Invisible, a stand-alone suspense novel, was published by Accent Press in 2014. Christine’s short stories have appeared in CWA anthologies, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and elsewhere. ‘A Tour of the Tower,’ was short-listed for a Short Mystery Fiction Derringer Award. In 2018 she was short-listed for the Margery Allingham Prize and the CWA Short Story Dagger. Invisible, a stand-alone suspense novel, was published by Accent Press in 2014.

Deep Water, published by Lion Hudson in 2016, is the first in a series set in Ely and the biotech industry, features scientist, Katie Flanagan, and patent lawyer, Daniel Marchmont. Cold, Cold Heart, the second in the series, sees Katie taking up a research post at an isolated base in Antarctica where six months of darkness are about to begin and the ten-strong team are about to become nine. In the third, An Air That Kills, Kate goes undercover in a high security research lab where the scientists are as deadly as the diseases.