About The Author

T. R. Dray is the pen name of Terence Robert Dray.

Raised in Leith, Edinburgh, during the 1970s, Terry developed an early obsession with the spy, cop, and thriller series that defined the era, the kind of television that took its characters seriously and never quite resolved cleanly. He spent his formative years exploring Arthur's Seat and the surrounding streets, absorbing the geography and architecture that now runs through the Edinburgh books like a current beneath the surface.

After studying at film school, Terry spent over thirty years writing screenplays and making short films, work that gave him a structural instinct and an ear for dialogue that he has carried directly into fiction. Two of his three series began as screenplays, the characters waiting patiently on the page until he was ready to give them the space a novel allows.

In between, he spent seven years working as a relief and head chef across more than three hundred hotels, restaurants, and clubs throughout Scotland. That experience — the kitchen politics, the transient life, the particular way you learn a place through its food — became the foundation for David Ray, a chef who moves through Scotland solving problems that were never on the menu.

Terry is the author of three series: the Rosa Underwood Dossiers, a dark and politically charged thriller series set in contemporary Scotland; the Fred Buchanan Mysteries, following an Edinburgh private eye navigating a city that keeps more secrets than it reveals; and the David Ray Mysteries, rooted in the hospitality world Terry knows from the inside.

If you're wondering where the name David Ray came from, the answer is a parcel that never arrived. Spelling his name over the phone one day, Terry said: "Terry Dray — D for David R A Y." The parcel arrived addressed to David Ray. A travelling chef detective was born.

Now living in Dumfriesshire, he writes surrounded by open country that is about as far from Leith as Scotland gets, and finds that the distance has given him a clearer eye for the city he grew up in. When not writing or producing short films, he tends to a small flock of chickens and a vegetable garden that rarely does what he intends.