Author Bio
• Birth—1947
• Where—New Zealand
• Education—J.D., Victoria University (New Zealand)
• Currently—lives near Dunsandel, New Zealand
Peter Graham is a New Zealand barrister-turned crime-writer. He received his law degree at New Zealand's Victoria University, after which he worked at a large full-service law firm before moving to Christ Church where he became a Crown Counsel for three decades.
He also spent five years as a prosecutor in Hong Kong, part of the Independent Commission Against Corruption. It was while working as a barrister in Hong Kong that he came across the story that would become his first true crime book, Vile Crimes: The Timaru Poisonings (2007).
Even before heading to Hong Kong, Graham admits that he had wanted to write about the Parker-Hulme case, the subject of his 2011 book So Brilliantly Clever (released as Anne Perry and the Murder of the Century in the U.S. in 2015). Graham has been fascinated by the case ever since the 1970s when he was an assistant to Brian McClelland, who had been junior counsel for Juliet Hulme some twenty-years earlier.
By the time he actually began working on So Brilliantly Clever, Graham had largely retired from legal practice. He and his wife moved to a small farm near Dunsandel, where he spent over three years researching the Parker-Hulme murder for the book.
Apart from writing, Graham says he supervises a few pigs, potters around in a "rather big garden," does a little bit of law and some traveling. He and his wife grow apples on the farm and produce a gold-medal-winning cider. (Based on an article from the Kiwi Blog Crime Watch.)