Karen Haden

Karen Haden is the author of the Alexander Baxby Mystery series. She left a career in consulting, including fifteen years with intelligence and cyber security agencies, to write historical crime thrillers about murder, secrets and spies in turbulent early 1600s.

Her Baxby novels are 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 experiences, her writing includes the precarious lives of ordinary men and women, not just those at court.

In Karen Haden’s debut Paying in Blood, set in 1600 Lincolnshire, ambitious young Baxby is drawn into a murky world of political/religious intrigue and espionage, after vowing to uncover the truth about the suspicious death of his friend’s wife. Released by Sharpe Books in 2024, the novel was long-listed for the Aspects of History Spymasters Award.

Her second 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.

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