Susan Elizabeth Steiner (29 June 1971 – 2 July 2022) was an English novelist and journalist best known for her three crime thriller novels set in Cambridgeshire, and whose central character is DS Manon Bradshaw.
Her early literary interests included Charlotte's Web, Stig of the Dump, and When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit; as a teenager, she read "all the Brontes, all of Austen, most of George Eliot, [and] all of Thomas Hardy.
"[5] In 1992, Steiner received a degree in English Literature from the University of York,[6] after which she moved back to London.
[6] Six months after her first novel, Homecoming, sold in a publishing auction, Steiner became legally blind as a result of retinitis pigmentosa.
[5] The book is a literary saga about the Hartles, a family of Yorkshire sheep farmers up on the North York Moors, facing life-changing events.
Their accountant has suggested that they sell the farm to pay off the debt but Joe is refusing to take his advice and wants to “keep calm and carry on”.
His younger brother, Bartholomew has moved away to South Yorkshire to run a garden centre and is at the beginning of a new relationship with his girlfriend, Ruby; he is therefore ambivalent about home.
[10] The novel has two storylines, the farm in the North and Bartholomew in the South, and follows the life-changing misfortunes that befell the family over the course of a year.
[11] The Manon Bradshaw trilogy consists of the following books: Missing, Presumed (2016); Persons Unknown (2017); and Remain Silent (2020).
[12] The book was shortlisted for the Barry Award[8][13] and the Theakston's Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in 2017.