Barry Rainsford

Barry started life as a musician before decades teaching in the most difficult and deprived areas of a major city. This provided him with a close-up of lives blighted by crime and social ills but, more importantly, insight into the lives of so many others who daily overcome circumstances that would overwhelm most of us.

For Barry, crime writing offers the opportunity to create compelling narratives that draw the audience in whilst engaging them with wider ideas beyond just the consideration of ‘cops and robbers’ or even ‘right and wrong’. The crime genre provides the possibility to consider many of the issues he feels strongly about, issues arising from his own roots in inner-city Birmingham and from his own life experiences.

Barry is now writing full time – having taught everyone from convicted murderers and psychopaths through to premier league footballers and Hollywood stars – and has a focus on untold stories and unheard voices.

After severing ties with his London based literary agency, Barry publishes as an independent author, a shift that enables him to write the kind of books he wants to in the way he wants.

Having published two ‘serious’ thrillers – All the Dead Men Lie, set in the social and political turmoil of the 1984 miner’s strike and Hollow: Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm?, a novel based on extensive research into the archived police case files of the still unsolved discovery of a young woman’s body interred in the hollow of a tree in 1943 – Barry is now writing a series of darkly funny crime thrillers set in his North Yorkshire home.

The first in the series – Broken Wings – has been described as a ‘North Yorkshire Slow Horses’ and features a group of once high-flying police officers who find themselves part of an anger management therapy group. Book 1 publishes February 2026 with Book 2 of the series Keepers of Souls due later in the year.