Bonner, a former chairman of the Crime Writers Association, was raised near the North Devon coast in Bideford, where her father was a butcher and ran a tea shop.
She was educated at the town's Edgehill College, and went on to be accepted for the Daily Mirror Training Scheme as a 17-year-old school leaver.
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.
No Reason to Die, her most controversial book, focuses on the 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.