Elizabeth Edmondson (1948-2016) was born in Chile, educated in Calcutta, London and Oxford, and worked in EFL publishing before turning her hand to writing novels. She had more than thirty books published in a variety of genres, but her lifelong preoccupation was on the one hand with English manners and eccentricities, and on the other with the conflicts of the thirties, the Cold War and espionage, in all of which her family had been involved. The Very English Mysteries, her last series, brought all of these preoccupations together in stories of the fictional cathedral city of Selchester, full of spies, gossip and goings-on.

A lifelong nomad, she lived in five countries and six English counties, founded a youth orchestra, rode horses, rang bells, enjoyed Baroque music and was never without an enormous collection of books, a wardrobe of sleek clothes, and the latest gadgets.

A Matter Of Loyalty, left unfinished at her death in January 2016, has been finished by her son, Anselm Audley, also a published novelist.

Anselm Audley is a fourth-generation writer whose antecedents include authors, linguists, spies and even a dictator. He grew up chiefly in cathedrals, lived in an assortment of historic English towns and landscapes, and was educated at Oxford and the British School at Rome. His passions are stories, landscapes and the past, with honourable mentions for making music, ringing bells and sailing the ocean blue. He now lives in yet another cathedral city.

Anselm is the author of four fantasy novels with a historical twist. More recently, he has written three non-fiction Kindle Singles, combining storytelling with historical understanding to bring the real predicaments of historical figures to life. He also worked as editor and informal story consultant on the two previous books in the Very English Mysteries series.