Joel Hames

Author Joel HamesJoel Hames lives in Lancashire with his wife and two daughters. After graduating Oxford University with a degree in English Literature, he embarked on a career as a lawyer, and subsequently a banker. Working in the now-notorious field of securitisation, Joel structured transactions financing anything from football clubs to factories and breweries to biscuits, and witnessed first-hand both the brilliance and the blindness that went into these billion-dollar deals.

In 2009 Joel quit the frenzied environment of the City for a quiet life in the heart of Pennine Lancashire, and dedicated himself to becoming a writer. When he is not sat with furrowed brow staring blankly at a computer screen, Joel enjoys cryptic crosswords, cooking and playing the piano (all at dilettante level), and volunteers as a school governor.

Joel’s first novel, Bankers Town, draws on incidents, deals and characters from his time in the City, although any actual criminality is entirely fictional, and charts the rise and fall of an ordinary man caught up in extraordinary events he doesn’t fully understand. Although dealing with an entirely different theme, The Art of Staying Dead also takes an everyday character, embittered human rights lawyer Sam Williams, and thrusts him into a world of lies and danger for which he is utterly unprepared. Following the brutal murder of two unarmed police officers, Dead North draws Sam into the murky world of Manchester’s organised crime scene, where nobody is quite who they seem to be and no one is more out of place than a London lawyer with no idea who he can trust.

The following novel, No One Will Hear, finds Sam dealing with on more familiar territory. Forced to work with his former nemesis to uncover the meaning behind a brutal murder, Sam discovers the uncomfortable truth in his own past. The novels conclude with The Cold Years, which sees Sam taking on the case of a teacher accused of historic sexual offences, and dealing with the aftermath of his girlfriend’s breakdown and a tragedy that lies close to home.

Brexecution is a novella: a political thriller which imagines a shady conspiracy behind the ‘Brexit’ referendum in the UK. Victims and Caged are a novella and short story dealing with the early years of Sam Williams’ legal career and the danger and self-doubt that accompanied them.