Peter May was a Scottish Young Journalist of the Year in 1973 and has gone on to become one of Scotland's most successful television dramatists, with more than 1000 writing credits in fifteen years, as well as being the author of an acclaimed series of novels set in China.

He created two major BBC TV series, The Standard and Squadron, and in the 1980s was storyliner and script editor on Take the High Road, a period in which the popular drama serial achieved record audience figures. In the 1990s, he created and produced the much-praised Gaelic drama serial, Machair. The subtitled series regularly achieved a 33% audience share in Scotland where only 2% of the population are Gaelic speakers.

The first of his China thrillers, THE FIREMAKER, was published in 1999. The ground-breaking series features a Beijing detective and an American pathologist. To research the books, May travels annually to China, where he has gained unprecedented access to the Chinese police. THE FIREMAKER was followed by THE FOURTH SACRIFICE (2000), THE KILLING ROOM (2000), SNAKEHEAD (2001) and THE RUNNER (2003). The sixth in the series, CHINESE WHISPERS, was published in 2004.

He has now embarked on a new series featuring Enzo McLeod, who specializes in unsolvable murders.

When the corpse of powerful American wine critic Gil Petty turned up in southwest France, local cops were perplexed: the body was dressed in the robes of a local fraternal organization and appeared to have been practically pickled in wine. Four years later, shortly after Enzo McLeod, who specializes in unsolvable murders, reopens the case, another wine-saturated corpse is found. Petty had made countless enemies in the wine world, and his ex-wife and daughter had few kind words to say about him, but what connects him to the second killing?