David Tory

David Tory was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, and built his first career far from the storytelling world — in software. He moved to London in 1962 to become a programmer, co-founded a UK software distribution company later acquired by Computer Associates, and relocated to the United States in 1980 to take on a senior leadership position at CA in New York. In 1988, he became CEO of a Boston-based software company, retiring in 1995. He went on to found the Essex County Community Foundation in 1999, retiring, again, in 2011.

It was a chance discovery— reading Nathaniel Philbrick's The Mayflower — that set David on an unexpected path. Struck by a series of historical coincidences the record never quite explained, he began researching the founding of New England in earnest, initially intending to write an academic thesis. He was ultimately persuaded that the real story deserved a different form: historical fiction, rich enough to bring overlooked people and unresolved conjectures to life in a way scholarship alone could not.

The result is The Stanfield Chronicles, a trilogy that follows Isaac Stanfield — fugitive, sailor, spy, and eventually confidant to the men secretly engineering New England's founding — through the journal he leaves behind. David lives in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, with his wife, not far from the New England coastline his novels bring to life.