My name is Andrew Barrett, and I work as a CSI in Yorkshire.

In 1996 I was lucky enough to be offered a job as a Scenes of Crime Officer, and suddenly my youthful writing 'career' had a new direction, a new genre, and things turned around quickly.

Between '97 and 2004, I wrote the SOCO Roger Conniston trilogy - A Long Time Dead, Stealing Elgar, and No More Tears. A Long Time Dead has earned best seller status on Amazon a few times over the years, and people often ask if I'm writing a new Roger book. Sadly, there are no plans to.

One day, around 2004, I was talking to someone about a burglar who had hundreds of convictions against him, yet was still walking around free. He said that people like that should be killed.

That gave me the idea for The Third Rule. It was a big project, and for it I needed a new hero. I needed someone who was angrier and more cynical than Roger Conniston; someone who was like me but more extreme. His name was Eddie Collins. The book was set in the future - 2015 to be precise. A new government brought back the death penalty for repeat offenders, and they called it the Third Rule: break the law three times and you're dead. But the system was corrupt and unfair. Eddie Collins found himself caught up in it, fighting against it, fighting for his life.

Eddie and The Third Rule were made for each other - quite literally. But I loved writing him so much I went on to write another five novels with him as the lead character. Over the intervening years I realised the first in the series didn't fit at all. I've spoken about the decision to remove The Third Rule from the line-up here, and wrote a replacement series opener, The Pain of Strangers.

The latest book in Eddie's series is Death Warning, and I published it in 2023.

And then?

And then I had a thought (I know, staggering, isn't it?). I decided to write a detective trilogy. The trilogy turned into a four book series, and I'm thrilled to say that Detective Sergeant Regan Carter has developed something of a cult following for being a fiery redhead. I loved writing her, and I might even begin a new series with her.

But my mainstay is Eddie Collins, and pretty soon we will be reunited in book 8.

Oh, I suppose I'd better include the regular bio thing: Andrew lives in Leeds with his wife and two daughters, two stupid dogs (a white goon of a German shepherd called Boomer, and a slack little fox terrier called Basil), a wobbly cat called Eli, and two cross-eyed goldfish. He still works as a full-time Senior CSI.