Ken Lussey is the author of eleven novels and a four-decade-old guide to hitch-hiking. His latest novels, ‘Friend or Foe?’ and ‘Thicker Than Water’ are, respectively, a fast-paced World War Two thriller set largely in south-west Scotland and a compelling contemporary murder mystery set in Caithness and Sutherland.

Ken spent his first 17 years following his family around the world; his father was a Royal Air Force navigator. This was a process involving seven schools and a dozen different postal addresses. He went to Hull University in 1975, where he spent much of his time hitch-hiking around Great Britain, met his wife Maureen and did just enough actual work to gain a reasonable degree in philosophy, that most useful of subjects!

Before getting a ‘proper job’, he researched and wrote ‘A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to Great Britain’, which was published by Penguin Books in 1983. He spent the next couple of decades as a civil servant, during which time he fulfilled the long-held ambition of moving to Scotland. In more recent times he has helped Maureen establish the website ‘Undiscovered Scotland’ as the ultimate online guide to Scotland and come full circle by returning to writing.

Ken’s latest novel, published by Arachnid Press in July 2025, is ‘Friend or Foe?’, a fast-paced thriller set largely in south-west Scotland. It is the seventh in his series of thrillers set in Scotland and beyond during World War Two. Its six predecessors, ‘Eyes Turned Skywards’, ‘The Danger of Life’, ‘Bloody Orkney’, ‘The Stockholm Run’, ‘Hide and Seek’, and ‘The Eye of Horus’, were published between 2018 and 2024. The third in his series of contemporary novels, ‘Thicker Than Water’, is a compelling murder mystery set in northern Scotland and was published in September 2024. It follows on from ‘The High Road’ and ‘A Tangled Web’, both published in 2023. Ken has also written ‘The House With 46 Chimneys’, a spooky adventure story for younger readers set in central Scotland against the background of the early days of the coronavirus lockdown. This was published in late 2020.