US author Amanda Kyle Williams loses battle with cancer

Best-selling American author Amanda Kyle Williams has died at the age of 61 after a long battle with cancer.

Williams, who lived in Decatur, Illinois, was known for her police procedural novels based around the character of Keye Street, a disgraced FBI profiler turned private investigator.

Those novels – The Stranger You Seek (Bantam 2011), Stranger In The Room (Bantam 2012) and Don’t Talk To Strangers (Bantam 2014) – were set in Atlanta and in other areas of Georgia.

The Stranger You Seek was hailed by Publishers Weekly as an “explosive, unpredictable and psychologically complex thriller that turns crime fiction cliches inside out.”

Her final book received the Yerby Award for Fiction in 2015.

She said in 2013 that she was inspired by writers such as Raymond Chandler and James Lee Burke and by how they made their locales of Los Angeles and New Orleans almost living and breathing characters in their novels.

“When I started to write about the city I knew and loved, the neighbourhoods, the state, it transformed my writing, gave it a realness it had been missing,” she said.

Williams was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and spent her childhood between Colorado and Georgia.

While she built her career as a novelist, she worked as a freelance writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and also took jobs as a house painter, property manager, sales rep, courier, embroiderer and dog walker. She also studied criminology.

She was passionate about animals and was one of the founding directors at Lifeline Animal Project.