Torquil MacLeod was an advertising copywriter for 36 years. Born in Edinburgh, he now lives in Cumbria, with his wife, Susan. He came up with the idea for his Malmö detective, Inspector Anita Sundström, after the elder of his two sons moved to southern Sweden in 2000, and the author befriended two police detectives (both of whom worked out of the Ystad police station, the town in which author Henning Mankell's set his Kurt Wallander crime series!).