I was born in Greenock, Scotland in 1960 and moved with my parents to East London in South Africa when I was six years old. I was educated at Selborne College in East London then spent three years at the Hotel School in Johannesburg. I first started writing vignettes and short stories in my teens, mainly for school magazines, and this blossomed into a love of writing. I spent a couple of years in hotel management after leaving college, working mainly for the Holiday Inns group, but the lure of writing was too great so, armed with a manuscript, I returned to the UK in 1985 to pursue my dream. The manuscript was sent to Collins publishers and ended up on the desk of Marjorie Chapman, the wife of Ian Chapman who'd 'discovered' Alistair MacLean. She felt there were similarities in our styles and I was offered the chance to write 'Death Train' based on an outlined left behind by Alistair MacLean's after his death. This led to me developing another six MacLean outlines into novels and the chance to write my own novel as well. This was 'The Devil's Door', based in El Salvador. My research included visiting El Salvador shortly after the civil war had ended. Walls were still pockmarked with bullet holes and there were a lot of ex-military personnel armed with machine pistols working as bodyguards for wealthy businessmen as kidnapping was rife in the country at the time. I managed to get lost in shanty town, which was quite scary as nobody spoke any English, and I was being watched with great interest by the locals! I then changed publishers, joining Victor Gollancz, and wrote four more novels under my own name - 'Moonblood', 'Double Blind', 'Damage Control' and 'Counterplot'. I then tried my hand at screenwriting over the next few years, without success, and returned to live in South Africa in 2006.