Jennie FinchJennie Finch is the award-winning author of four crime novels - the Alex Hastings series - and numerous short stories. In her youth, she attended Drama College, intending to work in the theatre but following an accident, retrained as a teacher. Afterleaving college, she had a number of jobs ranging from motor cycle messenger to work at the Tate Gallery before moving to Somerset with her partner. Here she helped devise a programme for young people with physical and emotional needs, helping them find appropriate training and employment. She also worked with young people on court orders and probation. This experience later helped her write her novels, set in and around the Somerset Levels and featuring a female probation officer. She relocated to the North East of England and continued to teach and lecture at an art college and several universities before taking an MA in Creative Writing at Teesside. In her first year as a full-time writer she was runner-up in the Impress Prize for debut novelists and second in the Lit Award of the Ruhr. Curious about her "missing" Irish family, she undertook a search for possible relatives, tracing them to Auckland in New Zealand, and the area around Cork. The happy co-owner of Tibetan dogs for over twenty years, she was delighted to meet a fellow enthusiast in her cousin, Jem. After she moved to Ireland, they worked together, using their experiences to write "Puppy Brain", the first of three novels about Liv, Petra and Woodstock. Read More Read Less