Karen Haden

Karen Haden left a career in consulting, including fifteen years with intelligence and cyber security agencies, to write historical crime novels about secrets, spies and evolving security threats.

Her Alexander Baxby historical mystery series is set during the Tudor and Stewart years, when the printing press was changing the security ‘landscape’ as the internet and social media are now. Reflecting the broad nature of her earlier career, her writing includes the perspectives of ordinary people not just those at court.

In Karen Haden’s debut crime thriller Paying in Blood ambitious young Baxby is drawn into a murky world of political/religious intrigue and espionage, after vowing to discover the truth about the suspicious death of his friend’s wife.

Her second novel Naming the Dead follows physician Baxby across the Narrow Sea to Amsterdam. He hopes to start his life anew there, free from political and religious control, but his confidence is shaken when the body of a young English man is found beneath the city’s Blue Bridge.

Sharpe Books published Paying in Blood in March 2024, followed by Naming the Dead in June 2025.