Graham Tempest is an accountant and novelist based in Florida. After a seesaw education at various schools public and private he squeaked into Cambridge by the skin of his teeth and spent his student days writing for the university newspaper and punting on the Cam. He studied engineering, then accounting and later practised as a CPA in Santa Monica, California. He now shuttles between Florida and Oxfordshire, playing hit-and-miss golf on both sides of the Atlantic. Steele, the main character in the CASINO novels, is an accountant with a shady past. Tempest admits to some resemblance.