David Penny

David Penny is a British author of historical mysteries whose career has followed an unusual course. First published in his twenties, he wrote four science-fiction novels and several short stories during the 1970s before abandoning fiction for more than thirty-five years. When he returned to writing, he chose to publish independently and turned from speculative fiction to the history of late medieval Spain. His interest in the cultural meeting point between Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities led him to create Thomas Berrington, an English physician whose medical knowledge repeatedly draws him into murder investigations and political intrigue.

Penny’s Thomas Berrington Historical Mysteries are set principally during the final decade of Moorish rule in Granada, as Ferdinand and Isabella’s armies advance towards the conquest of the Nasrid kingdom. Beginning with The Red Hill, the series continues through novels including Breaker of Bones, The Sin Eater, The Incubus, The Inquisitor, The Fortunate Dead and A Tear for the Dead, combining criminal investigations with warfare, religious tension and the approaching end of al-Andalus. A later sequence, the Thomas Berrington Tudor Mysteries, brings the ageing physician back to England at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It begins with Men of Bone and continues with A Death of Promise, The Hidden Dead, The Beasts of the City and A Surfeit of Grief, placing new crimes against the uncertain opening years of Henry VII’s Tudor dynasty.