Patricia Hall (Pseudonym of Maureen O’Connor, b. 1940), 1991: The Poison Pool

Patricia Hall was born in Bradford, where her father was a Latin teacher and later headmaster at a boy’s grammar school. Hall herself attended grammar school and, as she had discovered a love of reading and telling stories early in life, resolved at the age of thirteen to be a journalist. After she ‘talked [her] way onto the Yorkshire Post in Leeds’, Hall read English at the University of Birmingham where she met her future husband with whom she had two children