Paul Johnston was born in Edinburgh and educated there, at Oxford and at St Andrews; he was recently awarded a PhD in Creative Writing (crime fiction). He spends much of his time in Nafplio, Greece, with his Greek wife and Scottish-Greek children.

Paul’s first novel, Body Politic, set in 2020s independent Edinburgh and featuring the maverick investigator Quint Dalrymple, was a critical and popular success, and won the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger for Best First Crime Novel of 1997. It was followed by four sequels: The Bone Yard, Water of Death, The Blood Tree and The House of Dust.

He then started a long-running series starring the half-Scots half-Greek, Athens-based missing persons specialist Alex Mavros. The second, The Last Red Death – highly praised by authors such as George Pelecanos, Jeffery Deaver, Mark Billingham and Peter Robinson - won the 2004 Sherlock Award for Best Detective Novel. The sixth, 2013’s The Black Life, was seen by some critics as Paul’s best book yet – it deals with the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki and includes scenes in Auschwitz. The White Sea, June 2014, is the latest in the series.

Paul has also written a series with a crime novelist as protagonist and would-be detective. Matt Wells features in The Death List, The Soul Collector, Maps of Hell and The Nameless Dead (2007-11). The last two are set in the US. The Death List was shortlisted for the Barry Award.