Clare Mackintosh

Clare Mackintosh is a British author of psychological thrillers and crime fiction, and a former police officer who served twelve years with Thames Valley Police, including specialist roles in critical incident and public-order policing before turning to writing full-time. That background informs the procedural credibility of her novels, even though her work is generally domestic and psychological in focus rather than straightforward police procedural.

Her debut, I Let You Go (2014), about a hit-and-run and its aftermath, won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year and became an international bestseller, establishing her as a major voice in the wave of British psychological suspense that followed Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. Subsequent novels including I See You, Let Me Lie, After the End, and Hostage have continued to combine tight plotting with twists grounded in real anxieties -- surveillance, custody disputes, medical ethics, air travel.

Mackintosh contributed to The Understudy, a collaborative anthology-style thriller written with Sophie Hannah, B. A. Paris, and Holly Brown, joining several prominent psychological-suspense authors on a single shared project. She continues to publish standalone thrillers and remains one of the UK's most consistently bestselling crime writers.