Photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images (2009)
Sample of authors
Pears, Iain
Iain Pears is a British author, art historian and journalist. He was born in Coventry where his father was a company director and his mother a teacher. Pears attended Warwick School and Wadham College, Oxford, graduating with an MA in 1979. He did post-graduate studies at Wolfson College, Oxford, and earned his PhD in 1982. Pears was a reporter for Channel 4, the BBC, and the German channel ZDF...
Literary figures
Karen Pirie
Gender: Female
She is an overweight workaholic, but also exceptionally skilful when it comes to investigating old, unsolved cases in police novels by Val McDermid. Karen Pirie is the head of the Historic Cases Unit with its head office in Fife in Scotland. Her private life is minimal – but includes a sweetheart, her colleague Phil Parhatka, and she mourns deeply when he is killed on duty. But she soon throws h...