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John Baker is the creator of Sam Turner, a gritty Northern Private Eye working out of York. The series includes: Poet in the Gutter, Death Minus Zero, King of the Streets and Walking With Ghosts, all currently available. His latest novel, The Chinese Girl introduces ex-con Stone Lewis. The Chinese Girl is set in Hull and is a novel about masks, violence and exploitation and the necessity of confronting the past.

John Baker is a director of the CWA and a regular reviewer for the magazine Shots and the Internet's crime site, Tangled Web. He is also one of the seven members of Murder Squad, a collective of Northern crime writers who promote the genre through workshops, panels, readings and lectures. John spent many years living in a community with handicapped people on the North Yorkshire Moors. By way of a change he moved with his family to a barn in the South of France, and later spent two years in Norway, based in Oslo. He has worked in a variety of jobs, at one time or another in the wholefood business, the computer industry, wines and spirits ("Ah, those were the days..."), as an operative in the aircraft industry, and as a milk delivery man. He has published short stories in English and Scandinavian publications, and has twice been the recipient of a Yorkshire Arts Association Writers' Bursary. He has now settled in York, where he lives with his wife and family.