Alexander Baxby Mysteries

Karen Haden’s Alexander Baxby Mysteries follow a fictional physician through the political, religious and intelligence conflicts of the early seventeenth century. Paying in Blood begins with the Battle of Nieuwpoort in 1600 and carries Baxby into late Elizabethan England and the succession of James VI & I; Naming the Dead follows him into exile in Amsterdam in 1608 among English Separatists and the first generation of Baptist leaders.

The murders and Alexander Baxby’s personal story are fictional, but Haden places him alongside documented statesmen, clerics and religious dissenters and uses real controversies over conformity, printed propaganda, espionage and patronage. Both published novels are narrated from Baxby’s later imprisonment in 1613. A third mystery has been announced for 2026, but no reliable title or publication record was available when this export was prepared, so it has not been added.