Nick Louth

Nick Louth, author of the popular DCI Craig Gillard thrillers, has found international success as a novelist but his breakthrough was long-awaited and follows a previous career as a respected financial journalist. ...

A graduate of the London School of Economics, Louth became a foreign correspondent with Reuters in 1987 and worked in New York, London, Amsterdam and Hong Kong before embarking on a freelance career that allowed him to publish articles as well as longer works on finance. As part of his duties he attended a medical conference in 1992 – an assignment that seeded the idea for a novel.

While continuing to work in journalism Louth published three books tracing the tribulations of amateur investor Bernard Jones, but it was the pharmaceutical thriller Bite that was to reshape his career. Louth self-published the book in 2007 and revealed in an interview that it took him seven years to sell the 1,000 copies he’d had printed; its fortunes changed after he released it as an ebook, upon which it hit the Kindle bestsellers list.

Louth was awarded Article of the Year by the UK Chartered Financial Analysts Society in 2014 but fiction proved more of a lure than writing about the latest investment news. He penned two standalone thrillers then The Body in the Marsh, which introduced Surrey-based DCI Craig Gillard and established a loyal fanbase for his novels. The 12-book series reached a conclusion in 2023, freeing the prolific Louth to develop a new chain of books focusing on detective Jan Talantire and the criminal activity she encounters across Devon’s moors, coasts and villages.