Sophie Hannah

Sophie Hannah is a British novelist and poet, whose parents are novelist Adèle Geras and political theorist Norman Geras, who published poetry from her early twenties before building parallel careers in crime fiction. She holds academic posts at Cambridge, including a role helping create and run the university's Masters in Crime and Thriller Writing. Hannah's Waterhouse and Zailer series (2006-2022), also called the Culver Valley novels, made her name in psychological crime fiction: twelve books following socially awkward Detective Constable Simon Waterhouse and Detective Sergeant Charlie Zailer through dense, fractured-narrative mysteries built around genuinely disturbing premises, with a full puzzle-box reveal that only makes sense in the closing pages. She has also written several standalone psychological thrillers outside that series. In 2014, with the blessing of Agatha Christie's estate, Hannah became the first author ever authorized to write new Hercule Poirot novels since Christie's death, a six-book run starting with The Monogram Murders that keeps Christie's fair-play plotting and fussy, brilliant detective while introducing her own recurring companion character, Edward Catchpool, and leaning further into Poirot's interior anxieties than Christie usually did. New readers should pick their entry point by interest: Little Face for the Culver Valley series, or The Monogram Murders for her Poirot novels; the two don't overlap and can be read in either order.