Kevin was born in 1959 and grew up in Exeter, Devon, England. He studied Psychology and Philosophy at Birmingham, Aston University in 1980 and Cultural Studies in London in 1983. Kevin Brooks has been in a variety of jobs including: musician, gasoline station attendant, crematorium handyman, civil service clerk, hot dog vendor at the London Zoo, post office clerk, and railway ticket office clerk.

Kevin Brooks's writing career started with the publication of Martyn Pig in 2002 through The Chicken House which won the Branford Boase Award 2003 and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal. He also wrote Lucas (2002) which was shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and Booktrust Teenage Prize in 2003 also winning the North East Book Award in 2004 and the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis 2006.

In 2004 he published Kissing the Rain, Bloodline, I See You, Baby and Candy in 2005. In 2006 he published three books: Like Father, Like Son and Private Detective in the Johnny Delgado series, and The Road of the Dead, a standalone novel. In February 2008 he published the standalone novel Black Rabbit Summer, which has been shortlisted for the 2009 Carnegie Medal.

As a child, Kevin Brooks enjoyed reading detective novels. He writes most plots of the various books he has written around crime fiction. He likes mystery and suspense and enjoys putting both of those components into each and every story he writes in some shape or form.

Johnny Delgado Series

• Like Father, Like Son (novel)|Like Father, Like Son (2006)
• Private Detective (2006)

Standalone novels

• Martyn Pig (2002)
• Lucas (2002)
• Kissing the Rain (2004)
• Bloodline (2004)
• I See You, Baby (2005) (Co-written with Catherine Forde)
• Candy (2005) (Not to be confused with Candy, a novel by Maxwell Kenton)
• The Road of the Dead (2006)
• Being (2007)
• Black Rabbit Summer (2008)
• Killing God (2009) (Renamed Dawn for the North American edition)
• iBoy (2010)
• Summary of all(2010)