Hilary Bonner

Hilary Bonner (born 1949) is an English crime novelist, best known for her psychological thrillers.

Almost all Bonner’s novels are inspired by real life events, often drawing on her journalistic past. The Times described her as ‘keeping on the public agenda the stories our masters would prefer buried.’

Bonner, a former chairman of the Crime Writers Association, was brought up near the North Devon coast in the little white town of Bideford, where her father was a local butcher and ran a tea shop. She was educated at the town’s Edgehill College, and went on to be accepted for the Daily Mirror Training Scheme as a 17-year-old school leaver. She acquired her first job in Fleet Street aged 20, ultimately becoming show business editor of three national newspapers, The Sun, The Mail on Sunday, and The Daily Mirror, and assistant editor of one. She left Fleet Street in 1993 and became a full-time author.

Her published work includes ten novels, five non fiction books, two ghosted autobiographies, one ghosted biography, two companions to TV programmers, and a number of short stories.

Her novel The Dead Cry Out draws on her real life experience of living next door to a murderer. Its inspiration is the case of John Allen, Bonner’s friend and neighbour during the 1980s, who in 2003 was found guilty of the murder of his wife and two children 27 years previously.

No Reason to Die, her most controversial book, focuses on the notorious series of unexplained deaths at Deepcut Barracks and elsewhere within the British Army. Bonner worked with the families of several of the dead soldiers in order to produce a complex conspiracy theory which, while presented as fiction, was believed by some to have come uncannily close to the truth.

Her latest novel The Cruellest Game, set on Dartmoor, charts the cataclysmic collapse of a woman’s apparently perfect life when she finds that almost everything in it is based upon a lie. Published by Macmillan, hardback, August 2013, paperback September 2013.

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