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Author

Alys Clare

28 fiction

Alys Clare is the pen name of British novelist Elizabeth Harris, a historical mystery writer with a particular interest in archaeology, landscape and the persistence of the past in everyday places. She was brought up in Kent, studied archaeology at the University of Kent, and has spent much of her life close to the countryside that later inspired her fiction. Her historical novels often draw on real landscapes, old tracks, religious houses and archaeological remains, using them not merely as background but as part of the mystery itself. She divides her time between England and Brittany, both areas rich in medieval and prehistoric history.

Clare has written several substantial historical mystery series. The seventeen-book Hawkenlye sequence begins with Fortune Like the Moon and follows Abbess Helewise and Sir Josse d’Acquin in the England of Richard I and King John. The Aelf Fen novels move back to the late eleventh century and the reign of William II, while the Gabriel Taverner mysteries are set in seventeenth-century Devon and centre on a former ship’s surgeon. Her later World’s End Bureau series follows private investigators Lily Raynor and Felix Wilbraham in Victorian London, beginning with The Woman Who Spoke to Spirits. Across these series Clare combines murder investigation with medicine, religion, folklore and social history, frequently choosing periods in which older beliefs coexist uneasily with political or scientific change.

Periods and events

Albigensian Crusade1209–1229 CE Angevin Empire1154–1214 CE Captivity and Ransom of Richard I1192–1194 First Barons’ War1215–1217 CE Jacobean Era1603–1625 CE Second Crusade1147–1149 CE Third Crusade1189–1192 CE Victorian Crime1837–1901 Victorian London1837–1901 CE Victorian Spiritualism and Psychical Culturec. 1850–1901

Historical fiction

Historical fiction series by Alys Clare (3 series)

World’s End Bureau Mysteries in Order

by Alys Clare 5 books 4.3(5,255)

The World’s End Bureau Mysteries follow private enquiry agents Lily Raynor and Felix Wilbraham in London in the early 1880s. Their investigations move from séances and missing schoolgirls to Russian refugees, rural murder, a Breton asylum and human remains uncovered behind Tower Hill. The series uses Victorian detective…

Hawkenlye Mysteries in Order

by Alys Clare 17 books 4.2(14,980)

The Hawkenlye Mysteries follow Abbess Helewise and French knight Sir Josse d’Acquin as murder and private secrets disturb a fictional religious house in the Weald of Kent. Beginning in 1189 under Richard I, the sequence moves through the ransom years and King John’s troubled reign to civil war…

Gabriel Taverner Mysteries in Order

by Alys Clare 6 books 4.2(4,623)

The Gabriel Taverner Mysteries follow a former ship’s surgeon who settles as a country physician in Devon at the beginning of James I’s reign. Between 1603 and 1605, Gabriel applies medical observation and a sailor’s scepticism to deaths that draw him from the Tavy valley to Plymouth harbour…