Gary Townsend

Born in a sleepy hamlet called Runcorn. With its rolling fields, wooded glens and babbling brooks, it was a perfect idyll. Until its rivers were overrun by chemical factories and its farmland despoiled by inner city overspill, driving every bit of creativity from its streets. And so, when he was old enough, he ran away to London to seek his fortune, and maybe meet a page-three girl (which were a real thing back in the 1980s), not coming back for thirty years. While he was there, he worked as a maintenance engineer, then a project manager and finally a project planner working on some of the country’s largest and most prestigious projects: the Jubilee Line extension and HS1 to name but two.

When the bungalow he rented on a farm in Kent for sixteen years was to be demolished, he came back to Runcorn to buy a house and look after his ailing parents – which he obviously did a very poor job of as they are now both dead. It was only then he decided to write his first book The Pearl. It is said that a copy of The Pearl is sold somewhere in the world every six months!

But, undeterred by public apathy, he has written the second in the series – The Keeper.