Marnie Riches grew up on a rough estate in north Manchester. Exchanging the spires of nearby Strangeways prison for those of Cambridge University, she gained a Masters in Modern & Medieval German & Dutch.
She has been a punk, a trainee rock star, a high-level professional fundraiser and low-rent property developer.
Her five best-selling George McKenzie crime thrillers, tackling the subject of trans-national trafficking, were inspired by her own time spent in The Netherlands. The first in the series – The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die – won a Dead Good Reader Award in 2015.
Dubbed the Martina Cole of the North, she has also penned Born Bad and The Cover-Up – the critically acclaimed hit series about Manchester’s notorious gangland – and the PI Bev Saunders series, starting with Tightrope, set in Cheshire’s footballer-belt. Marnie has written children’s historical fiction as Chris Blake, and writes historical sagas as Maggie Campbell.
In tandem with her commitments as a novelist, Marnie is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Salford University’s Doctoral School. She also set up the inaugural Puffin/RCW/Commonword Children’s Diversity Writing Prize in 2011, delivering its children’s writing workshops.