Joy Ellis grew up and lived in Kent, trained in floristry in Mayfair and ran her own highly successful floristry business in Weybridge for many years. In the mid-1990s, she followed her lifelong love of books, first as the manager of an independent bookshop in Leatherhead, Surrey, then as a writer. When she retired, Joy and her partner Jacqueline and their two spaniels settled in a village just outside Boston, captivated by the Lincolnshire Fens.
Joy’s happy home life is far removed from her storylines, however, and while she loves living in the misty Fens, the area provides a remote and eerie backdrop to her novels. Joy is also able to add the authenticity vital to any crime thriller by drawing on Jacqueline’s inside knowledge, to confirm procedures and the reality of tackling brutal crime and criminals in a modern police force.
JOY IN HER OWN WORDS: “I always wanted to write a bestseller, surely every fiction writer does? But I never looked at the finished product from the reader/writer point of view. Now I know that my books fill someone’s lonely night, or accompany them into a hospital waiting room, or take them away (just for a little while) from something bad going on in their lives, now I know that, I feel very different, I feel like the luckiest woman in the world.”
Author Photo credit: Luke Cole