A woman with a killer instinct

SHE’S the 4’6” platinum blonde with the razor-sharp wit who has become a best-selling novelist by transporting hardened criminals, prostitutes, and their violent, blood-streaked lives directly into our living rooms.

The 50-year-old, who appears at the West Cork Literary Festival on Friday next, has 15 bestsellers under her belt – not to mention TV adaptations of her books, The Take, and Ladykillers – and is working on her 16th novel, while researching a documentary for Sky, on Girl Gangs in the UK and LA.

The youngest of five children in a large, Catholic family, in Essex, and with strong Irish roots – her mother, a psychiatric nurse, was from Dublin, her father, a merchant seaman, from Cork, plus she’s a cousin to former lord mayor of Cork, Denis Cregan – Cole knows Cork well.