Deborah is a writer and a historian. She was born in the Waikato town of Huntly, and attended Waikato University where she completed a Ph.D in New Zealand military history in 1998. 

   She originally went to university to study English, but didn’t actually like it and changed her major to History. Clearly the decision was meant to be, as all of her historical novels have appeared in the top five of the New Zealand fiction bestseller list, six reaching number one. She also writes non-fiction.
   In 1995 she won a New Zealand Returned and Services’ Association Military History Scholarship, and in 1997 received a New Zealand History Research Trust Fund Award and funding from the New Zealand Lottery Grants Board for the first edition of Grey Ghosts. Although she is not a journalist, she also wrote an opinion column and feature articles for the Waikato Times, and recently taught a summer paper for the History Department at Waikato University on researching and writing historical fiction for several years.
   Deborah currently lives with her husband in Newcastle, Australia, where she is researching and writing a series of novels for HarperCollins Australia, set in Sydney in the late 1820s about four convict girls who are transported from England.

   She likes music, particularly bands from her distant youth such as Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, and reads constantly. She also likes ‘Antiques Roadshow’, crème brûlée, beaches with no one else on them, and shopping (but who doesn’t?).