Stig Abell

Stephen “Stig” Paul Abell was born on 10 April 1980 in Nottingham, England. He studied English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a double first – a background that instilled both a deep love of literature and a journalist’s instinct for getting to the heart of a story.

His day job has been all over the place. Press Complaints Commission, managing editor of The Sun, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and now breakfast radio on Times Radio with Kate McCann. He published a non-fiction book in 2018 about how British institutions actually function. But the real obsession was always crime fiction. He read it compulsively. Has said publicly he prefers detective novels to films, theatre, all of it.

“I love detective novels above any other form of storytelling, film, theatre, or television.”

So in 2023 he wrote his own. Jake Jackson is a cop from London who inherits a falling-apart property from a dead uncle. He moves to a village called Caelum Parvum and finds bodies instead of peace and quiet. Four books so far. Lee Child blurbed the third one as irresistible and Karin Slaughter recommended them too. The series has picked up readers fast.

Quick facts

• Double first in English, Emmanuel College, Cambridge
• Former editor of the Times Literary Supplement
• Currently co-hosts Times Radio breakfast show
• First novel: Death Under a Little Sky (2023)
• Non-fiction: How Britain Really Works (2018)

What I like about the Jake Jackson books is that you can tell Abell has read thousands of mysteries and actually thought about what makes the good ones good. The countryside in these novels is muddy and cold and properly English. Jake is decent company, which matters more than clever plotting when you are four books into a series and deciding whether to keep going.