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Author

David Field

David Field is a British-born Australian author of historical fiction and historical mysteries. Born in post-war Nottingham and educated at Nottingham High School, he studied law before pursuing a career as a criminal-law practitioner and academic. He emigrated to Australia in 1989 and now lives in rural New South Wales. Field began writing historical novels as a counterpoint to his legal work but did not start publishing them until he was approaching retirement, when writing became his full-time occupation.

Field’s extensive fiction ranges from the Norman Conquest and medieval Plantagenet politics to Tudor exploration, Victorian crime and the settlement of colonial Australia. His principal sequences include the Medieval Saga, the Tudor Saga, the Wars of the Roses Saga, the New World Nautical Saga and the Australian Historical Saga. He has also written the Bailiff Mountsorrel Tudor mysteries and the Victorian Esther and Jack Enright and Carlyle and West series. Across these books, Field combines political upheaval, crime, family conflict and adventure with an interest in how ordinary people are affected by changes in monarchy, law, empire and social order.

Periods and events

Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain Victorian London Late Victorian Empire Elizabethan Age Victorian Crime and Sensation Culture Second Barons’ War Third Crusade First Barons’ War Reign of Henry VIII Spanish Armada Henrician Reformation Edwardian Reformation Jacobean Era Gunpowder Plot

Series

Series by David Field (8 series)

The Esther & Jack Enright Mysteries in Order

by David Field 13 books 4.3

The Esther & Jack Enright Mysteries follow seamstress-turned-investigator Esther and police officer Jack Enright from the Whitechapel murders of 1888 into the early Edwardian period. Assisted—and frequently endangered—by Jack’s unconventional uncle Percy, the family investigates murder, corruption, political conspiracy and crimes ignored by official institutions. The thirteen novels…

The Gaslight Stalker

4.1

The Night Caller

4.2

The Prodigal Sister

4.2

The Slum Reaper

4.5

The Posing Playwright

4.0

The Mercy Killings

4.4

The Jubilee Plot

4.4

The Lost Boys

4.5

The Retirement Murder

4.4

The Long Delayed Revenge

4.4

The Belvedere Scandal

4.4

The Footlights Murder

4.4

Matrons of Dishonour

4.7

The Bailiff Mountsorrel Tudor Mysteries in Order

by David Field 6 books 4.3

The Bailiff Mountsorrel Tudor Mysteries follow county bailiff Edward Mountsorrel and town bailiff Francis Barton as they enforce the law in Nottinghamshire during the final years of Elizabeth I and the opening of James VI and I’s reign. Local murders and disappearances repeatedly lead into wider conflicts over…

The Castle Abductions

4.1

The Assassination Players

4.3

The Slaughtered Widow

4.3

The Clamorous Dead

4.5

To Kill a King

4.4

Death by Gunpowder

4.4

The Medieval Saga in Order

by David Field 7 books 4.3

The Medieval Saga follows interlinked fictional families through two centuries of English dynastic conflict, beginning with the invasions of 1066 and ending with Simon de Montfort’s challenge to Henry III. The sequence places ordinary soldiers, household officers and landed families beside the rulers whose wars repeatedly reshape their…

Conquest

4.2

Traitor’s Arrow

4.3

An Uncivil War

4.4

The Lion of Anjou

4.3

The Absentee King

4.4

The Road to Runnymede

4.4

The Conscience of a King

4.4

The Tudor Saga in Order

by David Field 6 books 4.3

The Tudor Saga recounts the dynasty from Henry VII’s exile and victory in the Wars of the Roses to the final years of Elizabeth I. Historical rulers, ministers and royal relatives occupy the centre of the sequence, while fictional attendants and agents reveal how decisions at court affect…

Tudor Dawn

4.1

The King’s Commoner

4.4

Justice for the Cardinal

4.4

An Uneasy Crown

4.4

The Queen in Waiting

4.4

The Heart of a King

4.4

Carlyle & West Victorian Mysteries in Order

by David Field 4 books 4.3

The Carlyle & West Victorian Mysteries follow London doctor James Carlyle and preacher Matthew West as they investigate deaths that expose the fears and contradictions of the 1890s. Their cases move through the East End, music halls, circuses, hospitals and the Tower of London, where new forensic methods…

Interviewing the Dead

4.1

Death Comes but Twice

4.4

Confronting the Invisible

4.4

Death Among the Nightingales

4.3

The Wars of the Roses Saga in Order

by David Field 2 books 4.4

The Wars of the Roses Saga begins well before the fifteenth-century conflict, tracing the Plantagenet inheritance from the defeat of Simon de Montfort in 1265. The fictional Bywater family serves successive kings and discovers that royal patronage can restore an estate in one reign and destroy it in…

The Royal Hammer

4.4

The Squandered Crown

The Australian Historical Saga in Order

by David Field 4 books 4.1

The Australian Historical Saga follows successive generations of the Bradbury family from the First Fleet settlement at Port Jackson to the gold-rush colonies of the nineteenth century. Convicts, soldiers, lawyers, settlers and Aboriginal communities contend with a society being built through coercion, migration, commerce and contested land. Beginning…

A Far Distant Land

3.9

Eye for an Eye

4.1

A Colony Divided

4.2

All That Glitters

4.2

The New World Nautical Saga in Order

by David Field 3 books 4.2

The New World Nautical Saga traces English maritime expansion from the youth of Francis Drake to the settlement voyages of the early seventeenth century. Sailors, courtiers, merchants and religious dissenters cross an Atlantic increasingly contested by European empires and shaped by private enterprise. Pirates and Patriots follows Drake…