Petra Hammesfahr, born in 1951, has not had an easy life: she left school at thirteen and became pregnant by an alcoholic husband at seventeen. It is a life that has provided inspiration for her bittersweet family crime novels where the sweetness of childhood and the horror of adults meet. Hammesfahr has written over twenty crime and suspense novels and writes scripts for television and film. She has won numerous literary prizes, including the Crime Prize of Wiesbaden and the Rhineland Literary Prize.
