Hilary Bonner

Who is Hilary Bonner?

Hilary Bonner is an English crime novelist, best known for her psychological thrillers. Her latest novel The Cruellest Game, set on Dartmoor, charts the cataclysmic collapse of a woman’s apparently perfect life when she finds that almost everything in it is based upon a lie. Published by Macmillan, hardback, August 2013, paperback September 2013. Almost all Bonner’s novels are inspired by real life events, often drawing on her journalistic past. No Reason to Die, her most controversial book, focuses on the notorious series of unexplained deaths at Deepcut Barracks and elsewhere within the British Army. Bonner worked with the families of several of the dead soldiers in order to produce a complex conspiracy theory which, while presented as fiction, was believed by some to have come uncannily close to the truth, and led The Times to describe her as ‘keeping on the public agenda the stories our masters would prefer buried.’ When The Dead Cry Out draws on her real life experience of living next door to a murderer. Its inspiration is the case of John Allen, Bonner’s friend and neighbour during the 1980s, who in 2003 was found guilty of the murder of his wife and two children 27 years previously.