Rachel Abbott was born and raised in Manchester. She trained as a systems analyst before launching her own interactive media company in the early 1980s. After selling her company in 2000, she moved to the Le Marche region of Italy. When six-foot snowdrifts prevented her from leaving the house, she started writing and found she couldn't stop. Since then her debut thriller, Only the Innocent, has become an international bestseller, reaching number one in the Amazon charts both in the UK and US. This was followed by bestselling novels The Back Road, Sleep Tight, Stranger Child, Kill Me Again, The Sixth Window, Come a Little Closer, The Shape of Lies, Right Behind You, Close Your Eyes, plus a novella, Nowhere Child, which was top of the Kindle Singles chart in the UK for over two years. She has now sold over four million books in the English language, and her books have been translated into over twenty languages. In 2015 Amazon celebrated the first five years of the Kindle in the UK and announced that Rachel was its number-one bestselling independent author over this period. She was also placed fourteenth in the chart of all authors. In 2018, And So It Begins, the first title in a new series featuring Sergeant Stephanie King, was published in hardback by Wildfire Books - a Headline company. It was named by The Times as one of the best crime novels of 2018 and was top of the Amazon weekly chart for two weeks. The second book in the series, The Murder Game, was released in April 2020. Rachel Abbott now lives in Alderney and writes full time.