Rebecca Jenkins

Rebecca Jenkins was born into history and never recovered. Her first home was a fifteenth-century college house in Oxford High Street with the red and white roses of the War of the Roses carved over the door.

In her early teens she was such a fan of Baroness D’Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel that she took up fencing, determined to master the “prise de fer”. Her library began at the same age – collecting cheap between-the-wars editions of diaries and memoirs from the Georgian era. She spent the second half of her childhood in Switzerland but returned to Oxford University to take a degree in history.

Sewing a loose buckle on a towering ugly sister’s shoe aged 16, as a dresser at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, Rebecca discovered a fascination with theatre and celebrity that later led to her first non-fiction book, a biography of Georgian actress and anti-slavery campaigner, Fanny Kemble (The Reluctant Celebrity, Simon & Schuster, 2005).

Raif Jarrett, the returning soldier and detective of her Regency mystery series, first appeared in The Duke’s Agent in 1997. Despite the many distractions of a busy career in communications and PR, his world remains her first love. In between producing a book on The First London Olympics, 1908 (Piatkus Little Brown, 2012), the opening novels of the Faith Morgan series (as Martha Ockley – Monarch Books), and serving as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at York St John University, she managed to return to write the second book of the series, Death of a Radical. She is presently at work on the third Jarrett mystery.

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