Marianne Macdonald

Marianne Macdonald was born in the lumber town of Kenora, Northern Ontario, and grew up in Winnipeg and Montreal.

Her first children's book was published when she was 16. She took her BA at McGill University, then went to Oxford for graduate studies in English. For thirty years she pretended to be an academic acquiring various degrees and teaching at various universities in Canada and England. She left teaching early in order to return to her writing.

Since 1996 she has published a series of novels in which Dido Hoare, thirty-something London single mother and antiquarian book shop owner, is involved in murder and mayhem thanks to her itch of curiosity and an inability to back down even when she knows she should. DEATH'S AUTOGRAPH, GHOST WALK, SMOKE SCREEN and ROAD KIILL, BLOOD LIES, DIE ONCE and THREE MONKEYS have been published to date.

Dido Hoare, antiquarian bookshop owner and single parent, is walking her young son home from nursery. When Ben tells her he has seen a monkey, she assumes it is a figment of his imagination. However, Dido suddenly remembers having met both a monkey and its owner, one of the rough sleepers in the neighbourhood, and her duty seems clear: she must restore the poor animal to his master. Dido does recover the lost monkey, but its owner only reappears briefly when he finds the dismembered body of a girl in a pile of rubbish sacks across the road from the shop; and although he escapes from police custody and then leaves some of his belongings in Dido's dustbin for safekeeping, he is found injured in the street nearby, supposed victim of a hit-and-run accident. This bewilders not only Dido, but the local police, and journalist and heartthrob Chris Kennedy who is in the midst of a newspaper investigation into people-trafficking, and even Dido's father, Professor Barnabas Hoare. Before long, others complicate the problem: DC Ken Acker, who seems to be playing his own game; his injured wife, one of Dido's oldest customers; two thugs who invade the bookshop; a girl called Nina; and above all Annie Kelly, the retired prostitute trying to make her way in the world with the help of some shoplifting and a bribe from the journalist, Chris. After that, things become a little confusing, and working them out takes all the help and courage Dido can find...and a little more.