Hilary Bonner

Hilary Bonner (born 1949) is an English crime novelist, best known for her psychological thrillers. Almost all Bonner's novels are inspired by real life events, often drawing on her journalistic past.

Biography

Bonner, a former chairman of the Crime Writers' Association, was raised near the North Devon coast in Bideford, where her father was a butcher and ran a tea shop. She was educated at the town's Edgehill College, and went on to be accepted for the Daily Mirror Training Scheme as a 17-year-old school leaver. She acquired her first job in Fleet Street aged 20, ultimately becoming show business editor of three national newspapers, The Sun, The Mail on Sunday, and the Daily Mirror, and assistant editor of one. She left Fleet Street in 1993 and became a full-time author.

Her published work includes ten novels, five non fiction books, two ghosted autobiographies, one ghosted biography, two companions to TV programmers, and a number of short stories.

Work Her novel The Dead Cry Out draws on her real life experience of living next door to a murderer. Its inspiration is the case of John Allen, Bonner's friend and neighbour during the 1980s, who in 2003 was found guilty of the murder of his wife and two children 27 years previously.

No Reason to Die, her most controversial book, focuses on the series of unexplained deaths at Deepcut army barracks and elsewhere within the British Army. Bonner worked with the families of several of the dead soldiers in order to produce a complex conspiracy theory which, while presented as fiction, was believed by some to have come uncannily close to the truth.

Her novel The Cruellest Game, first published by Macmillan in 2013, is set on Dartmoor. It charts the cataclysmic collapse of a woman's apparently perfect life when she finds that almost everything in it is based upon a lie.

The Times described her as 'keeping on the public agenda the stories our masters would prefer buried.'

Personal life Bonner married actor Amanda Barrie on 12 September 2014. The couple live in homes in the Blackdown Hills, Somerset, and London.

Books

Fiction The Cruelty of Morning, 1995 A Fancy to Kill For, 1997 A Passion So Deadly, 1998 For Death Comes Softly, 1999 A Deep Deceit, 2000 A Kind of Wild Justice, 2001 A Moment of Madness, 2002 When the Dead Cry Out, 2003 No Reason to Die, 2004 The Cruellest Game, 2013 Friends to Die For, 2014 Death Comes First, 2015 Deadly Dance, 2017 Wheel of Fire, 2018 Dreams of Fear, 2019 Cry Darkness, 2020 The Danger Within, 2021

Non Fiction René and Me: The Story of Gorden Kaye, with Gorden Kaye, 1989, Benny: a biography of Benny Hill, with Dennis Kirkland 1992 Journeyman, with Clive Gunnell, 1994 Heartbeat – the Real Life Story, 1994 It's Not a Rehearsal: The Autobiography of Amanda Barrie, with Amanda Barrie, 2002