Rachel Lynch

Best known for her series of police procedurals featuring DI Kelly Porter, Rachel Lynch travelled extensively and followed two other careers before she ‘found time to write that book I’d been meaning to push out for twenty years’....

Lynch grew up in Cumbria before moving to Lancaster to study history, then to London to teach the subject. On marrying an army officer she moved from one country to another and qualified as a personal trainer and sports massage therapist. Writing was always ‘the overwhelming driving force’ though, and using her much-loved lakes and fells as inspiration, and thorough knowledge of anatomy and physiology to add authenticity, Lynch embarked on a new career with the creation of her DI Kelly Porter crime fiction series.

Lynch’s 2018 debut, Dark Game , sees the locally born Kelly Porter return from the Met to take up a role with the Cumbrian police force. Despite its apparent tranquility the Lake District is the setting for one brutal tragedy after another (stabbings, ritual homicides, a suspicious helicopter crash) and Porter has been kept busy – Lynch has now written eleven books in the series and reached over a million sales, with fans particularly taken by Porter’s compassion.

In 2021 Lynch turned her attention to a new protagonist, and a variety of more exotic locations, with her Royal Military Police series. The books follow Major Helen Scott, first tracking down the kidnapped son of an oil magnate in The Rift , then taking up a role in Cyprus, where her predecessor died in suspicious circumstances, in The Line .

More recently Lynch has authored the psychological thriller The Rich . Published in 2023, it weaves together the secrets a group of wealthy neighbours reveal to their therapist, Dr Alex Moore, and the investigation into the murder of her friend.

Lynch continues to produce two or three books a year, following the advice of her agent to ‘put away my notes and just write from instinct’ to write two to four chapters in a day.