Photo: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images (2017)
Sample of authors
King, Stephen
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine. His father, Donald Pollock, a vacuum cleaner salesman, sailor and philanderer (King has a half-sister in Brazil), went through a number of aliases before he changed his surname to King. When Stephen was two years old, his father went out to buy cigarettes and never came back. Stephen grew up in poor circumstances with his mother Ruth and his...
Literary figures
Vera Stanhope
Gender: Female
An eccentric, middle-aged, controversial detective chief inspector in Northumberland and in a series of police novels by Ann Cleeves. Stanhope is a grim lone wolf and workaholic, in part because as a child she was subjected to sexual abuse by an acquaintance of her single father. She still lives in her childhood home, drives her father’s old Landrover and solves murder cases in her own very s...