New Books Network Interview: Maren Halvorsen

Good murder mysteries take many forms, and good historical fiction often builds on questions and circumstances that may not have the outward structure of a classic detective novel but are nonetheless driven by unanswered questions and coincidences that require explanation. In my latest New Books Network interview, featuring the historian and historical novelist Maren Halvorsen, about The Bailiff’s Wife, we explore the ways in which historically attested incidents can be turned into engrossing fictional tales—up to and including an unsolved murder. Read on, and listen to our conversation, to find out more.

As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Despite the long-held perception that medieval and early modern women were as quiet, pious, and obedient as society expected them to be, the truth is more complex. The Bailiff’s Wife (Cuidono Press, 2025) builds on a historical event recorded in a seventeenth-century English broadsheet to create a picture of a society in flux, the result of far-reaching political and religious changes that found expression in the English Civil War and its aftermath, the Restoration of King Charles II.

Sarah Kidd, a woman whose husband has gone missing, along with the small fortune with which he intended to support her and their infant son, sets out—defying the demands of social convention—to find out what happened to her Nathaniel. She tracks him to the Cotswold village of Chalfont St. James, where despite relentless hounding, the local constable and magistrate refuse her requests for an exhumation of the body discovered in the village three years before and never identified.

After annoying pretty much everyone in town by her refusal to take no for an answer, Sarah finds support from the unlikely combination of Frances Bright, a relatively well-off Quaker widow with two daughters, and Arthur Brunskill, the local vicar whose Puritan religious sympathies have fallen out of favor with the Restoration. As the tale unfolds, it develops into a classic murder mystery. Someone in Chalfont St. James caused the death of Nathaniel Kidd, and Sarah will not let matters rest until she sees the killer brought to justice. And this small, insular setting turns out to harbor plenty of suspects anxious to avoid drawing notice to themselves …