Background
Marinina was born in Lviv, Ukraine to a family of lawyers.
Marinina was born in Lviv, Ukraine to a family of lawyers.
She studied the personality of criminals with anomalies of mentality and criminals who have committed repeated violent crimes, earning a Doctor of Philosophy (Kandidat of Law degree) in 1986.
She lived in Leningrad until 1971 and has lived in Moscow since then She received a degree in law from the Moscow State University in 1979. From 1979 to 1998 she worked in research and education units of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministry of the Interior).
She resigned from the militsiya system (a semi-formal term for the set of Ministry of the Interior organizations) in February, 1998 to become a full-time writer
Before her resignation, she had the rank of the lieutenant colonel of militsiya. In December 1992, she finished her first novel Confluence of Circumstances which was also published in Militsiya magazine, in 1993.
She has written over 30 novels, published in over 17 million copies and translated into over 20 languages. (The only English translation presently available is of her Confluence of Circumstances, which was published in Soviet & Post-Soviet Review, Volume(s) 29, 2002) Most of her novels have a common central character Anastasia (Nastya) Kamenskaya.
A television series Kamenskaya based on eight of Marinina"s novels was shown on national Russian television, and also in Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Poland, Germany and France.