Edward John Wood (a.k.a Ted Wood, a.k.a Jack Barnao) is an English-born, Canadian-based writer. Wood was born in Shoreham, Sussex, England. He lived in London until the outbreak of the Second World War, at which time he moved to Worcestershire. While in England, he served in the RAF Coastal Command. In 1954, he immigrated to Canada, working as a policeman in Toronto until 1957. That year, he joined MacLaren Advertising as a copywriter, eventually becoming a creative director. During his early years in Canada, he sold short stories to Canadian and American magazines and wrote television plays, including the musical comedy Mister Scrooge, produced in Toronto and on CBC television. In 1974, he published a collection of Chekhovian short stories, Somebody Else's Summer. In 1984, Wood published the Dead in the Water, which won the Scribner's Crime Novel Award. The book was published in the USA and Canada and was the first in a series of ten novels--including Murder on Ice (1984) and A Clean Kill (1995)--that were subsequently translated into numerous languages. Wood lives in Whitby, Ontario.