Joy Ellis

Joy Ellis is a British crime novelist born in Kent, England, who worked variously as a florist and a bookshop manager before turning seriously to writing after being encouraged by novelist Sue Townsend at a writers' workshop in Greece. She and her wife, Jacqueline, a retired police officer, live in the Lincolnshire Fens -- the flat, drained farmland and dyke-crossed landscape that gives her best-known books their setting and, often, their titles.

Ellis writes across several parallel detective series, all published by the digital-first imprint Joffe Books and set in and around the fictional Fenland town of Greenborough. The DI Nikki Galena series, beginning with Crime on the Fens (2010), follows a driven, rule-bending detective inspector investigating organised crime and violent cases across the Fens. The DI Rowan Jackman and DS Marie Evans series, launched with The Murderer's Son (2016), centres on a different pairing within the same fictional police force, allowing the two series to share a setting and occasional cast while following separate protagonists and cases. She has also written a shorter series featuring Detective Matt Ballard. Ellis's books have been notably successful in audio and ebook formats: in 2018 she was named Audible's Breakthrough Crime Writer of the Year, and The Patient Man was shortlisted for Crime and Thriller Book of the Year at the 2021 British Book Awards.