Timothy Williams (born 1946) is a bilingual British author who has written six novels in English featuring Commissario Piero Trotti, a character critics have referred to as a personification of modern Italy.

Williams is among the small number of authors writing Italian crime novels in English (including Magdalen Nabb, Michael Dibdin, and Donna Leon), three of whom are British and were born in the span of a single year.

Williams is also the author of a series of crime novels set in Guadeloupe in the French West Indies featuring Anne Marie Laveaud, a juge d'instruction.

Commissario Trotti investigates crime in a small, unnamed city on the river Po in the north of Italy (sometimes erroneously identified as Padua, but more close to Pavia, at least for "Converging Parallels").

This milieu keeps the Polizia di Stato busy and in his enquiries Trotti frequently confronts problems facing Italian society: terrorism, political instability, corruption, socialism under Craxi, Operation Clean Hands (mani pulite), and above all, the decline of civilised intercourse.

Writing in a minimalist style, in which he relies largely on dialogue to advance the plot, Williams has at times been considered a demanding author.

Some readers find that pace and tension are sacrificed for sociology and politics and that the moody, brooding Trotti, addicted to rhubarb sweets, is too slow and too wordy for their taste.

In 1980, the ex-convict, Hegesippe Bray, returning home after forty years spent in the penal colony of Cayenne, has been charged with the murder of a white landowner who was running him off his property.