Kat Armstrong

Kat Armstrong has loved fiction from an early age. She gave up the life of an academic for the more arduous one of raising children, but the urge to write never left her, and she duly turned out some spectacularly unpublishable novels before enrolling to study for an MA in Creative Writing in her forties. Nominated for several writing awards, including the Mslexia First Novel Prize, she went on to attend other courses after graduating, notably one in crime fiction by the novelist Stephen Booth which proved a turning-point.

Having once written a doctorate on the eighteenth-century novel, Kat was intrigued to try her hand at a historical murder mystery. A Pair of Sharp Eyes started life as a single image of a young Black slave boy, and with its heroine, Coronation Amesbury, who marched into Kat’s head one day when she was thinking about servants and what they must have seen.

A Pair of Sharp Eyes reflects Kat’s love of history, her interest in Daniel Defoe’s enterprising heroines, and her preoccupation since childhood with Bristol’s roots in the transatlantic slave trade. Despite its sombre backdrop, A Pair of Sharp Eyes is funny and irreverent; a servant girl sleuth uses her social invisibility to spy on her employers, exposing their foibles and hypocrisies … and ultimately their darkest crimes.

Corrie Amesbury is determined to bring to justice the brutal and unscrupulous people she encounters in Bristol and beyond. There are proving to be many of them. A sequel to A Pair of Sharp Eyes, set in the West Indies, is underway, and a third Sharp Eyes mystery is in the planning.