Michael Ridpath spent eight years as a bond trader in the City before giving up his job to write full-time. He wrote eight thrillers set in the worlds of business and finance, before turning his hand to something slightly different. The result, Where The Shadows Lie, the first in a series featuring an Icelandic detective named Magnus, was published in June 2010. This was followed with 66° North and Meltwater. He lives in north London with his wife and three children.

Michael’s Fire and Ice series, set in Iceland, achieves fascinating tensions and contrasts. His hero, policeman Magnus Jonson, a native Icelander who grew up in the USA, is both insider and outsider. Modern society and politics are the background for these crime thrillers, but so too is history and legend, and through each book runs the a historic family mystery that obsesses Magnus. Always, there is the astonishing volcanic landscape, vividly described as a background to the action.