Lesley Thomson is a prize-winning crime writer. She graduated from the University of Brighton and has an MA from the University of Sussex. She teaches creative writing at West Dean College near Chichester and lives with her partner in Lewes, East Sussex.

Her first novel, Seven Miles from Sydney, is a crime thriller set in Australia. She also co-wrote actress Sue Johnston’s autobiography Hold on to the Messy Times. Lesley’s second novel  A Kind of Vanishing was published by Myriad in 2007 to critical acclaim, and won the People’s Book Prize for Fiction in 2010. She is also the author of  the number one bestseller The Detective’s Daughter, Ghost Girl and The Detective’s Secret.  The seventh novel in this series, The Playground Murders, was published in April 2019.

Lesley Thomson is also a contributor to The Brighton Book, a mixed-media anthology published by Myriad in association with Brighton Festival.

Interviews and Features

Lesley at WEA Write Now masterclass weekend

Lesley teaches ‘How to Plot’ at the WEA Write Now masterclass weekend.

Lesley Thomson writes in the Guardian

‘I am an only child, but for one year, when I was seven, I had a brother. David, also an only child, was three months older than me. I first met him when he visited with his father in the spring of that year. I was impressed by my uncle’s good looks, conflating him with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. His son – my cousin – sat on our sagging green settee, done up in a grey school uniform although it was the weekend, his socks tightly pulled up to his knees. My school did not have a uniform, and none of the boys I knew could have kept so still…’

Lesley Thomson writes in the Guardian about how being an only child has shaped her career as a writer.