Keith McCarthy was born in 1960 in Croydon, Surrey and educated first at Dulwich College, south-east London, and then at St. George‘s Hospital Medical School. He entered specialist pathology training a year after achieving his primary medical degree, working mainly at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London. During his training he received a research Doctorate and became a Member of Royal College of Pathologists in 1995. His first Consultant post was at the Royal Marsden Hospital but a year later he moved to Gloucestershire where he has worked ever since. He is married with 3 daughters and lives deep in rural Gloucestershire close to the borders with Herefordshire and Worcestershire.
He started writing as a teenager, turning out the usual adolescent drivel and regards this period now as merely practising the skills required to write. During his medical training he necessarily wrote little but began again as a junior pathologist. His first completed novel saw the light in the early nineties, the next a few years later.
This was the novel that he considered mature enough to be worthy of publication. He found an agent who tried to market this but who was unsuccessful. The next novel was considered unsatisfactory and was not presented for publication (although it has since been recycled); the one after this was rejected by all the publishers who saw it. By this time, and with a new agent, success came with the appearance of the following novel, A Feast of Carrion, which was published by Constable and Robinson in July 2003 in hardback, and in December 2005 in paperback. They went on to publish its successors, The Silent Sleep of the Dying (hardback 2004, paperback 2006) and The Final Analysis (hardback 2005), A World Full of Weeping (hardback 2006), and The Rest is Silence (hardback 2007).
Severn House publishing have recently published the sixth and seventh Eisenmenger-Flemming novels, A Passion Put To Use (hardback 2008), and Corpus Delicti (hardback 2009). The eighth, entitled The Soul Seeker, is due to be published at the end of 2010.
In addition to writing forensic thrillers, McCarthy has published a rather different, less hard-edged mystery under the pseudonym of LANCE ELLIOT, entitled Murder Plot (Harlequin Black Crime, paperback, 2008). Severn House publishing will be producing the second in this series, Dying to Know in April 2010.