Valentina Giambanco

Valentina Giambanco biography

Valentina Giambanco’s first love has always been movies and as soon as she walked into a cutting room – actually a cramped college edit suite with an old two-machine system – she knew she was home.

She started in films as an editor’s apprentice in a 35mm cutting room making tea and sharpening pencils. Since then, over almost twenty years, she has been involved in many UK and US pictures, from small independent projects to large studio productions.

She was an early reader and has always kept notebooks of ideas for stories she wanted to write: when she started my first novel, THE GIFT OF DARKNESS, she only knew that it would be about a young homicide detective who is forced by circumstances to investigate a case with a criminal. And the story would be part procedural, part thriller and full of the twists and turns she loved in her favourite books and movies.

She set the Alice Madison series in Seattle because she had fallen in love with the city many years earlier and it was a way of being there. Seattle and the ruthlessly beautiful wilderness of Washington State have shaped and inspired the stories in every way and continue to do so.

She lives in South West London but spends most of her day in the Pacific Northwest.