Gerard O'Donovan was born in Cork and grew up in Dublin. After university and a brief career in the Irish civil service he travelled around for a good few years, doing everything from bar work to teaching English, before eventually settling down to make a living as a journalist, critic and, now, author. Among the newspapers hes worked on are The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph.

In 2007 he was lucky enough to be shortlisted for a Debut Dagger award, the Crime Writers' Association's competition for unpublished novelists. That set in train a series of events that led to his debut novel The Priest being published, and becoming a bestseller, in Ireland, the UK and many other countries as far afield as the Netherlands, India, Australia, the US and Canada. His second book, also featuring Mike Mulcahy and Siobhan Fallon is called Dublin Dead. It is just about to be published...