Unsung Heroes of Crime Fiction By Lynne Patrick: Thorne Moore

An occasional series which looks at the work of authors whose books qualify as bestsellers,
but who still aren’t quite as famous as they deserve to be.

Thorne Moore

 

Every now and then an author crops up whose books are quite unlike any others, categorize them how we may. Thorne Moore is one of those authors. Born and brought up half an hour from London, she decamped to a remote cottage in west Wales forty-some years ago to run a restaurant, which she says made her party to the kind of gossip and local tales which fed into her first published novel, A Time for Silence, spotted by small Welsh publisher Honno.

She's always been a writer, though her struggle to be a published one lasted into middle age. She started by  writing fantasy and science fiction in her teens, and never really stopped even though she had to resort to other things to earn a living. Along the way she earned degrees in history and law, and the day jobs included library and clerical work, making miniature furniture, and running that restaurant. 

When she was first published she couldn't seem to settle in one genre. She wrote well-researched historicl historical  mystery, well-plotted domestic noir, and a complex science fiction trilogy – but mainly she wrote, and still writes, about characters: people having their lives turned upside down, and what happens to them afterwards, whether they are perpetrators, victims or survivors.

Domestic noir is as close as she comes to a comfort zone, and most recently she has embarked on a series featuring an ex-detective who specializes in tracking down missing persons and solving the kind of cold cases the police have given up on. There are bodies, and murderers, but mainly the series is about the protagonist who is driven by her own past, and the people she encounters in the course of her searches – in other words, about characters, whom Thorne gets to know inside out. The result is the kind of crime fiction which makes the discerning reader keep going back for more. 

Her books are varied, page-turning and very well written, and there's a mystery at the centre of most of them. We all love puzzling out a mystery – but the biggest one of all is, why isn't Thorne Moore a best seller?

Books by Thorne Moore

 Cold Case

Best Served Cold (2025)
Cold in the Earth (2024)
This Cold Night (2026)

 Salvage (SF)

Inside Out (2021)
Making Waves (2022)
By the Book (2023)

 None Series Books

A Tine For Silence 
 Motherlove (2015)
The Unravelling (2016)
The Covenant (2020)
Fatal Collision (2022)
Bethulia (2022)