Mike Ripley is the author of 28 novels including the award-winning 'Angel' series of comedy thrillers and one of the few authors to win the Crime Writers' Last Laugh Award twice. From 1989 to 2008 he was crime fiction critic for the Daily Telegraph and then the Birmingham Post, reviewing over 950 crime novels and co-edited three volumes of 'Fresh Blood' stories by new British writers, including Ian Rankin, Lee Child, Ken Bruen, Charlie Higson and Christopher Brookmyre. He was also a scriptwriter on the BBC's series "Lovejoy". Professionally, he read history at university, trained as a journalist and went into public relations, working for the Brewers Society in London, promoting British beer and pubs, for 21 years. As part of his obligatory mid-life crisis, he gave up life in the big city and retrained as an archaeologist, working mostly on Romano-British sites in East Anglia. At the age of 50 he had a stroke. He survived, recovered, wrote a book about it and served on the government's Stroke Strategy Committee which reported in 2009. He has produced festival performances with crime writers Colin Dexter and Minette Walters, as well as devising a Creative Crime Writing course for Cambridge University and the comedy panel game "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Cluedo" which was performed as the finale to the 2016 Crimefest convention in Bristol. Currently he writes the monthly "Getting Away With Murder" column on www.shotsmag.co.uk and for The Guardian newspaper. He was the series editor of the Ostara Crime and Top Notch Thrillers imprints, rescuing and reviving more than a hundred crime novels and thrillers which did not deserve to be forgotten. He completed the third Albert Campion novel left unfinished on the death of Pip Youngman Carter (husband of Margery Allingham) in 1969. "Mr Campion's Farewell" was published in the UK and the US in 2014 and he has continued the Campion series annually with "Mr Campion's Memory" appearing in 2023. He has also edited "Tales on the Off-Beat" - a collection of short stories by Youngman Carter and two volumes of "Callan Uncovered" by James Mitchell, creator of the legendary television series starring Edward Woodward. He became known as the unofficial historian of the British thriller after the publication of "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" which won the 2018 H.R.F. Keating Award for non-fiction.