How our region plays a significant role in popular crime-novel series

Bradford-born Lesley McEvoy has made herself known in the crime writing world.

- by Jennifer Cartwright

Her Murder in Yorkshire series delves into the thrilling life of forensic profiler Jo McCready as she helps solve the darkest of crimes across the region.

Book five in the series, The Corpse Light, will comes out today (July 31), just in time for Yorkshire Day.

As a child, Lesley remembers creating stories out of paper and sticky tape. However, a teacher discouraged her from seeing writing as a realistic career choice.

Lesley said: "When I was five, the teacher went around the class and said what does everybody want to be when they grow up? There was the usual fireman, train driver, policeman, nurse but I said I want to be a writer like Enid Blyton.

"The teacher at the time said people like us read books, we don't write them."

An undeterred Lesley continued to write, though her tastes shifted from children's stories, as a young child, to love stories in her teens, to historical fiction in her twenties. She turned to writing crime when her career path led her into psychology.

For over 25 years, Lesley worked as a behavioural analyst, profiler and psychotherapist. This career led her to working inside prisons but it also led her to working inside business rooms where she analysed how psychopathic behaviours often help individuals climb the corporate ladder. Lesley joked: "There were more psychopaths that I saw in business than I saw in prison."

Lesley's idea for her now well-known protagonist Jo McCready, stemmed from her own experience analysing human behaviour.