Karen Haden

Karen Haden is the author of the Alexander Baxby historical murder mystery series. Her debut Paying in Blood is set in Lincolnshire and London, during the succession from Queen Elizabeth to King James. After performing impromptu surgery at the 1600 Battle of Nieuwpoort, ambitious young Baxby vows to uncover the truth about the suspicious death of an amputee’s wife. He is drawn into a murky world of political and religious intrigue as he investigates this and a subsequent murder. Released by Sharpe Books in 2024, Paying in Blood was long-listed for the Aspects of History Spymasters Award.

Her second novel Naming the Dead follows physician Baxby across the Narrow Sea to 1608 Amsterdam. He hopes to start his life anew in the new Dutch Republic, free from English political and religious control. However, his confidence is shaken when the body of a young English man is found beneath the Blue Bridge which links the city to islands were immigrants live. This leads to an enthralling murder investigation, against the vivid backdrop of ‘Golden Age’ Amsterdam, including an improvised autopsy in a canal house loft.

Haden left a career in consulting, including fifteen years with intelligence and cyber security agencies, to write historical crime thrillers about murder, secrets and spies during the Tudor and early Stuart 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 work, her writing includes the precarious lives of ordinary men and women, alongside those at court.

In each book, Baxby tells his story from his prison cell. In the third in the series, due for release in 2026, the physician will return to England in very different circumstances from those in which he left.