Born in London and raised in Fiji, Charlie Charters spent his working life based in Hong Kong and now lives near Malton, North Yorkshire, which rightly considers itself the horse-racing capital of the known world. One of his first memories is of traveling with his mother, an award-winning filmmaker, as she tried to piece together the rackety strands of Somerset Maugham’s life-changing treks through the Pacific. Those trips—and being caned on his thirteenth birthday by a headmaster whose own father, it turned out, had similarly thrashed the schoolboy Roald Dahl—somehow gave him an early desire to become a writer. However, he did very little about this until turning forty, by which time he had worked, variously, as a racing tipster, war reporter, radio DJ, and award-winning TV producer and presenter. He is married with four children and a Labrador that likes to watch the news. Bolt Action is his first novel.