Laurie R. King was born in the San Francisco Bay area, as were her mother and grandmother, of a family who left England to make their fortunes in The Colonies. Fortunes eluded, but adventure awaited, embracing a sponge-diving uncle, a captain in the China trade, and the family's experience of living in a tent in Golden Gate Park in the weeks following the earthquake of April 1906.

King spent most of her undergraduate years exploring the workings of the human spirit, earning a Bachelor's degree in Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz before concentrating on the area of Old Testament theology, attaining a Master's degree at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. Her thesis was on "Feminine Aspects of Yahweh."

After receiving the MA, King spent three years deep in the world of the householder, with two small children, three acres of garden, and a crumbling farmhouse to occupy her time. When the younger child entered preschool, freeing his mother three mornings a week, she began to write fiction. King has averaged a book a year since she began writing.

As the past shapes the story in many works of the mystery genre, so King's own past shapes her fiction: Theological ideas permeate a number of the books, children wander in and out of the stories as they do her life, and she even uses her long experience as a propper-up of derelict houses as the foundation of Folly (Bantam, 2001).

In 1997, as recognition of King's application of her Master's degree to fiction, she was granted an honorary doctorate from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, her Berkeley seminary. The award sits proudly on a shelf with the 1993 Edgar for Best First Novel (for A Grave Talent), the Creasey dagger from England's Crime Writer's Association (also for A Grave Talent), and the 1995 Nero Award (A Monstrous Regiment of Women). She has also received the Nevermore and the Gail Rich awards, and has been nominated for another Edgar (With Child), an Anthony, an Agatha, a Macavity, and England's Orange Prize. Her novels are published in sixteen languages, and have reached two million in sales worldwide.