ANNA SMITH is an award winning journalist, formerly chief reporter of the Daily Record in Scotland, and sometimes newspaper columnist, with a bit of travel writing thrown in. She divides her time between her homes in Scotland and the West of Ireland and Spain. Her style of writing as a frontline journalist, covering wars and major stories across the world as well as major investigations in the UK and Northern Ireland, won her many awards, and she has transferred that gritty, colourful way of writing to fiction, bringing alive the characters in her novels.