Timothy Williams (author)

The first five Trotti novels were originally published by Gollancz in London. They are now available in paperback edition from Soho Publishing. The sixth novel, The Second Day of the Renaissance, was published by Soho Publishing in May 2017.

In 2012 Rivages Noir published Un autre soleil, a crime novel set in the island département of Guadeloupe, in the French Caribbean. In 2013, the book was published by Soho Crime. In 1980, the ex-convict, Hegesippe Bray, returning home after forty years spent in the penal colony of Cayenne, has been charged with the murder of a white landowner who was running him off his property. Nine months before the French presidential elections of 1981, for political reasons, the authorities wish to view the murder as an open-and-shut case of revenge killing. Anne Marie Laveaud, the juge d'instruction (investigative magistrate) in charge of the case, does not agree. To learn the truth, she will put herself, her career and her family in jeopardy.

Williams' first French novel, Un autre soleil, set in the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, was published in Paris by Rivages in March 2011 and was published in English in New York City in April 2013 as Another Sun.

For the Observer Timothy Williams is one of the ten best European crime novelists. "The five books in Williams’s Commissario Trotti series, written from 1982–96, are hard to find, but if you liked Zen (Dibdin’s books or the TV series) you’ll enjoy Trotti just as much. A delight."

Williams is among the small number of authors writing Italian crime novels in English (including Magdalen Nabb, Michael Dibdin, and Donna Leon), three of whom are British and were born in the span of a single year. Ms. Nabb's Death of an Englishman was published in 1981 and Williams' Converging Parallels followed in 1982. Williams is also the author of a series of crime novels set in Guadeloupe in the French West Indies featuring Anne Marie Laveaud, a juge d'instruction. Mr. Williams, who holds dual British/French citizenship, currently lives on the island of Guadeloupe and teaches in the main lycée of Pointe à Pitre.

Timothy Williams (born 1946) is a bilingual British author who has written six novels in English featuring Commissario Piero Trotti, a character critics have referred to as a personification of modern Italy. Williams' books include Black August, which won a Crime Writers' Association award. His novels have been translated into French, Italian, Danish, Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, and Japanese.

Having grown up under Fascism and having lost a brother in the partisan war of 1943-45, Piero Trotti is cynical yet dourly optimistic. By the fifth novel this optimism is in scant evidence. Trotti's estranged wife lives in America. A number of women find Trotti appealing but Trotti is torn in his loyalty to the marriage.