Karen Haden left a career in consulting, including fifteen
years with intelligence and cyber security agencies, to write historical novels
about secrets, spies and evolving security threats rather than dealing with
them in the office.
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.
Paying in Blood was published by Sharpe Books in March 2024. The second Alexander Baxby mystery is scheduled for May 2025, in which the physician’s hopes of starting his life afresh in Amsterdam, free from Geoffrey and the Church’s control, are dashed when the body of a young Englishman is found in the River Amstel.