K. J. Maitland is the pen name used by British historical novelist Karen Maitland for her Jacobean crime novels. Maitland grew up in Malta, an experience she credits with helping to develop her fascination with history, and later travelled and worked in several countries before settling in Devon. She holds a doctorate in psycholinguistics and has worked as a lecturer and teacher of creative writing. Under her own name she established herself with dark medieval novels such as Company of Liars, The Owl Killers, The Gallows Curse, The Vanishing Witch, The Raven’s Head, The Plague Charmer and A Gathering of Ghosts, often combining carefully researched medieval settings with crime, superstition, religious fear and elements of the uncanny.
Writing as K. J. Maitland, she created the four-book Daniel Pursglove series, set in the unsettled years immediately following the Gunpowder Plot. The Drowned City begins in 1606 amid the catastrophic flooding of the Bristol Channel and introduces Pursglove, a man forced into the dangerous world of Jacobean spies and religious conspiracies. Traitor in the Ice moves to Battle Abbey in the winter of 1607, while Rivers of Treason follows Daniel through England as political and religious plots close around him. The sequence concludes with A Plague of Serpents, set in London in 1608, where he must infiltrate a Catholic conspiracy threatening James I. The series combines murder mystery and espionage with the religious divisions, intelligence networks and political insecurity of early Stuart England.
Michael Jecks
58 books
Bernard Knight
31 books
Tracy Chevalier
9 books
Barbara Hambly
36 books