Elena Forbes Books in Order

Elena Forbes grew up in London, in a family of writers and actors, and she seems to have been making up stories for as long as she can remember. As a child she filled her head with plays, scraps of dialogue, and mysteries that needed solving.

Agatha Christie and Nancy Drew were early companions, so crime fiction got to her early.

She studied French and Italian at Bristol University, then spent years working in portfolio management for international investment groups. It is not the most obvious route into crime writing, but in her case the practical day job and the storytelling impulse seem to have run side by side for a long time.

For years she carried story fragments around without turning them into a novel. Then a spell of enforced bed rest finally pushed her to try. After false starts and rejected submissions, the first chapter and synopsis of Die with Me were shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger in 2005, and the finished book was published in 2007.

That debut introduced DI Mark Tartaglia and the Barnes Murder Squad, and it also set out the things Forbes keeps returning to: careful police work, flawed investigators, hidden lives, and London as more than just scenery. She has said setting matters to her, and you can feel that in the churches, parks, cemeteries, riverside streets, and quieter corners of west London that shape her novels.

London is all over her work.

The Mark Tartaglia books, Die with Me, Our Lady of Pain, Evil In Return, and Jigsaw Man, are police procedurals with a strong sense of place and a lot of pressure pushing in from the outside. Readers tend to come for the murder cases, but stay for the team dynamics, the emotional wear and tear of the job, and the way each investigation opens into something larger and messier than it first appears. Her detectives do not glide through neat puzzles. They work, argue, doubt themselves, and keep going.

With A Bad, Bad Thing, Forbes shifted to a new lead, Eve West, a detective trying to save her career while reopening an old murder case. That move let her keep the procedural side she does well while writing from a different angle, with a female protagonist carrying secrets of her own and a case tangled up with questions of trust, loyalty, and justice.

She now lives in central London with her husband and two children. That feels like the right home base for her fiction, because her books read like they were written by someone who knows the city from the inside, not just its landmarks, but its moods too.