I spent 25 years working for HM Customs & Excise, including over 7 years as a Commissioner and Board Member. I also worked in other Government Departments, including Treasury, Cabinet Office. Department of Social Security and Department for the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; and as a consultant, advising on government projects in the UK and in Georgia and Kosovo, reviewing major Government projects, training people appearing before Parliamentary Committees' , on the Standards Committee of my local authority and advising small charities. Apart from writing books, I write and play music (violin, guitar, banjo, mandola), paint, do moderately long trail runs, play badminton and study Eastern literature and Latvia. I am married to Vanessa, who taught in a special needs school, with two daughters, Jo - a professional musician and music industry entrepreneur - and Kat - a personal trainer and teacher of English as a foreign language. I am also now a grandfather to Joshua and Jasper.

After Customs & Excise was progressively dismembered after the merger with Inland Revenue in 2005, I wanted to preserve memories of a unique organisation. Because Customs are poorly represented in crime literature,  I felt that books about the wide range of Customs crimes could kill two birds with one stone. So I developed my main characters in "The Waterguard" set in 1964 - Nick & Rosemary Storey (a C&E official and a policewoman in the Metropolitan Police). Subsequently, I've taken them through their careers covering a wide range of Customs & Excise work, and into retirement in thirty or so books.

I have been writing virtually all my life. My pride is "Through Fire", a long adventure novel, which took me 30 years of my life to write. I followed it up with "By water" and "Out of sight" and have recently completed "Borne on the wind".

Recently, I started writing detective stories set in the mid-17th century, the period I studied in greatest detail for my degree. I have also started a spy novel based on the 1905 Russian Revolution and subsequent years.

I've also now published poems and short stories which I've written over the years, as well as several short books reflecting on 2020  and 2021, the plague years and subsequent years.

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