Lucretia Grindle

Lucretia Walsh Grindle (born May 10, 1960) is an American author of mystery fiction. She is signed to Macmillan Publishers.^[1]

One of two daughters of newspaper reporter turned entrepreneur Paul Davidson Grindle and his wife the former Patricia Walsh (which couple also had two sons),^[2] Lucretia Grindle was born in Boston MA and would spend her formative years residing with her family either at her parents' American home in Sherborn MA, or at their British home in the Tunbridge Wells village of Benenden where Grindle was first brought at six months of age.^[3] Having graduated with a degree in religion from Dartmouth College and subsequently studying theology and philosophy at Oxford University, Grindle then worked as a freelance journalist - said to specialize in "feature length profile work and sport"^[4] - in both the US and UK and also in Canada: Grindle was also for a time a horse breeder and professional jockey^[5] (Grindle's mother, who pre-marriage had spent five years as a circus bareback rider, was the longtime operator of the Moat House riding academy in Benenden).^[3]

Grindle's first two novels to be published, the Pocket Books-issued The Killing of Ellis Martin (1993) and So Little to Die For (1994), both featured elements of the cozy mystery genre and had a common central character in British police inspector H W Ross. Later recalling the first phase of her career as a novelist Grindle would remember writing "two books for every one that was published",^[5] and her third published novel would not appear until 2003 when she made her hardcover debut with the psychological suspense novel The Nightspinners^[6] which was shortlisted for the Silver Dagger awarded by the CWA.^[5]

The Faces of Angels, published in the UK in 2006 and cited by BBC Radio 4's “Front Row” as one of the six best thrillers of the year, was the first of three novels by Grindle to combine elements of psychological suspense with the police procedural genre in an Italian setting, having a common character in Florentine ispettore Alessandro Pallioti, with the two followup novels having the additional dimension of "interweaving modern plots with story lines set [at] critical moments in Italian 20th century history. The Villa Triste is the story of two sisters living in Florence in 1943, during the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation. The Lost Daughter is based on the kidnapping and murder of Italian politician and former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978."^[5]

Purportedly Grindle's choice of Florence as her preferred literary locale was the result of several trips she and her husband made to Florence in the first years of the twenty-first century, the first of which was occasioned when in the wake of the 9/11 crisis of 2001 Grindle and her husband had a discussion about "what they would choose to do if the world were going to fly to pieces" in which Grindel opined: "I want to go to the Uffizi. If World War III is going to break out, let's go to Florence."^[7]

The Faces of Angels would be nominated for an Edgar Award for best original paperback novel for 2012 the novel being published that year as a US trade paperback;^[8] The Villa Triste - longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger award upon its 2010 UK publication^[9] - would be published in the US (as Villa Triste) in 2013 while The Lost Daughter would have UK and US publishing dates of respectively 2011^[10] and 2015.^[7]

In 2003 Grindle and her husband David Mansfield Lutyens (born 22 May 1926) were said to have been alternating residency between the English county of Devon and the US state of Massachusetts.^[11] By 2008 the couple had settled in Blue Hill, Maine, the ancestral home of the Grindle family and the birthplace of Grindle's father.^[2] In December 2017 Grindle was said to be working on a novel dealing with the Sicilian mafia of the late 20th century.^[5]

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