Tim Weaver is an English writer primarily known for his crime thrillers featuring missing personsinvestigator David Raker.
Career
Journalism
Prior to publication of his first book, Weaver was a videogames journalist. He was editor of cult gaming title, N64 Magazine and spent six years as Editor of Xbox World, leaving the magazine in 2011. More recently, he appeared as co-host of YouTube show GTA V O'Clock. In his wider career as a journalist, he has written about the long struggle he and his wife had to start a family.
Novels
Weaver's debut crime thrillerChasing the Dead – which took ten years to get published – was released in February 2010 and introduced the character of David Raker. Raker is a former journalist, who gave up his career in newspapers to care for his wife after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The book begins twelve months after her death, and centres on the mysterious reappearance of a man thought to have died in a car crash. The Guardian called it "an impressive debut", though questioned the characterisation of Raker. On a BBC Radio Somerset interview, when asked about Raker's background, Weaver described how he drew on his own traumatic battle to have a child. His fourth book, Never Coming Back, is the first in the series to move entirely away from London, and is set in Devon and Las Vegas. On 28 August 2013 it was announced that Never Coming Back had been selected for the Richard and Judy Autumn 2013 Book Club. On 18 November 2013, it was shortlisted for Crime & Thriller of the Year in the Specsavers National Book Awards, and on 16 December 2013 iTunes included it in their 'Best of 2013' list, naming it Best British Crime Thriller. On his decision to have David Raker specialise in missing persons cases, Weaver has said: "I just became very interested in the idea of a person going missing in an age where we have CCTV on every street, 24-hour rolling news channels, and constant access to cameras through our phones. It seemed like an intriguing starting point for a book. It sounds trite, but I was also struck by the human cost. Can you imagine how many stories must go untold when a person vanishes?" In October 2013, Weaver contributed a short story entitled Disconnection to #YouDunnit, a joint venture between Penguin and Specsavers. The major themes of the story – including the victim, crime scene location, and central character – were crowdsourced on Twitter.
In September 2015, Weaver wrote and presented an eight-part podcast series called Missing, looking into how and why people disappear. It was selected by iTunes as one of the best podcasts of 2015. In August 2016, Weaver recorded three further episodes.
