Ed Wright grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, where his father sold hardware and his mother raised three children and taught arts and crafts. He spent a year at Hendrix College in Arkansas, then transferred to Vanderbilt University, where he majored in English lit and graduated with honors. One college summer was spent studying at Harvard, another hitchhiking around Western Europe with a couple of friends.

The first book in this series, Clea's Moon, won England's Debut Dagger award. The second, While I Disappear (published in England as The Silver Face), won the Shamus Award and the Southern California Booksellers Association's award for best hard-cover mystery novel of the year.

The third, Red Sky Lament, set against the backdrop of the Hollywood Red Scare, was honored by the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain with its Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award for 2006.

Ed and his wife, Cathy, a psychotherapist, live in the Los Angeles area with Magic, a young and energetic female Belgian shepherd. He has temporarily abandoned the 1940s to write Damnation Falls, a contemporary mystery-thriller set in small-town East Tennessee. His next novel, now under construction, will be another stand-alone, this one set in present-day California.