Cathy Dobson was born in 1963 in Marple, Cheshire, the town after which Agatha Christie named her famous female sleuth, Miss Marple. She studied modern and medieval languages at Cambridge University between 1982–1986. In 1991 she moved to Germany and in 1995 settled in Meerbusch in the Rhineland with her husband, three children and a fluctuating number of cats. Her first novel, Planet Germany, was published in 2007, to wide acclaim in the German and British press. The Devil’s Missal is her second novel.