David Stanley has a background in photography and television production. He ran an internet company during the dot com bubble and when that ended he decided to return to his first love, writing. He wrote a book called Sleeping with Rachel, a claustrophobic literary novel about a war photographer with PTSD. The novel was never published, but was a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. During this time, David began reading a lot of crime novels, starting with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith, before progressing to newer books by Lee Child and Michael Connelly. These books were more like the movies and TV shows he liked to watch and he decided to write his own. Night Passenger is his first published novel.