May 3, 2026

Detective Superintendent Grace O’Malley, of London’s Met Police, is not going to feature in a Sunday evening TV prime time cosy crime series any time soon. She rides a Harley, is rude and abrasive and, for good measure, her husband has a penchant for BDSM sex with students looking to supplement their income. In another part of the city (it is Halloween) we have Juliette Boucher, a TV journalist. She receives a bizarre phone call from a man who calls himself the Witchfinder General. He tells her to be on Westminster bridge just before midnight, where she will witness something beyond newsworthy.

And spectacular it is. And gory. A motor launch comes into view, and it is on fire. On it is standing a woman. She burns, too. Then, there is a series of explosions, and the boat sinks. Here’s the thing. It was the so-called Witchfinder General who phoned Grace to tip her off about her husband’s sexual proclivities. When the police try to trace the owner of the boat, they find that it was sold by a retired civil servant to a man called – wait for it – Matthew Hopkins.

For younger readers, the real Matthew Hopkins was a Protestant zealot who, around the time of the English Civil War, toured the eastern counties of the country – Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire – in search of those he called witches. It is estimated that he had over two hundred women – mostly guilty of nothing more than being herbalists or natural healers – violently put to death.
The man who has named himself after this monster is clearly very clever, has sources inside the police force, and is hell-bent on recreating a reign of terror. His first victim, the woman in the boat? Veronica Crosse, a TV medium and celebrity speaker.

The authors have added another (potentially corrosive) spice to their recipe, and one that is not directly connected to the man who has modeled himself on a 17th century serial killer. Grace’s husband Dominic is himself a copper, but not just any old plod. He is Assistant Commissioner Dominic Boswell, of New Scotland Yard.

We are introduced to a bizarre clergyman named Moses Blackmore, who is the incumbent of a tiny parish near Yeovil. He wears a long black coat, a string tie and has a long silver beard. His human flock (he is also a farmer) are less of a congregation than a cult, and are in thrall to Blackmore’s fire and brimstone brand of protestant fundamentalism. While the police procedural aspect of the book had, this far, been impeccably convincing, I realised that there would be a horror-fantasy element to the narrative, too. That is not a problem. I am a huge fan of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker novels, in which he effortlessly blends the PI genre with the supernatural. It’s just that these days, the Church of England simply does not allow an old fashioned vicar to run a single parish. In real life, Moses Blackmore would be in charge of at least four or five other nearby parishes. And, most likely, he would be a woman.

A little over a third of the way through, there is a dramatic raid and arrest in an upmarket London hotel but, of course, it’s the wrong man, and yet another example of the WFG playing the police like a Stradivarius. There is a second murder, this time of another elderly woman spiritualist, hanged from a church tower and then burned. The WFG (and his associates) cause the filmed scene to be played out on a big screen at a huge public gathering in London on Bonfire Night.

Grace eventually cracks the case (or so she thinks) and finds that the perpetrators are connected to some of the most powerful and influential people in government and public service. There is the mother of all twists in the final pages, but I don’t do spoilers, so you will have to find out for yourself. Witch Hunt is an imaginative and energetic canter through the fields of corruption, revenge, and madness, and it will be published by Severn House on 5th May.

Meiron Trow (left) and I attended the same school in Warwick, but he was a few years behind me, so it would be a lie to say we were school chums. We both went on to spend our working lives as teachers, and I share his endless cynicism about school leadership – and his boundless optimism about the decency of most of the youngsters who we taught.

Peter Maxwell, a history teacher on the south coast of England, is something of a Trow self portrait. The series began in 1994 with Maxwell’s House and now, ‘Mad’ Max returns. I am not a huge fan of modern so-called ‘cosy’ crime. Murder is abhorrent and a blight on society. Surrounding it with the cotton wool of village gossips, eccentric squires, glowing Cotswold limestone villages and inquisitive old ladies might have worked in the 1930s but for me, at least, it doesn’t work now.

What lifts the Mad Max novels is Trow’s deep sense of actual English history – and the humour. His pushbike is nicknamed White Surrey after Richard III’s charger; his son is Nolan, named after the ill-fated officer at The Charge of The Light Brigade. And then we have the throwaway cultural references. Admittedly, these will only work with readers of a certain age, but references to John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’, Are You Being Served? and lines from ‘Sylvia’s Mother’ did make me smile.

After giving what he thought was an uncontroversial talk to a local history group, Maxwell is told that he has been reported to the local police and accused of a hate crime. New readers will soon be aware that Maxwell’s wife is a police officer. His first wife died in a car accident and he has married Jacquie relatively late in (his) life.

The hate crime accusations seems just the work of a crank, but then there is an explosion in a house in town, and a body is found in the wreckage. The connection? The destroyed house was No. 38 – the same as Maxwell’s home in another part of town. Thanks to that bosom friend of both police officers and crime novelists, deoxyribonucleic acid, the charred corpse from No. 38 gets a name or, to be more accurate, several names. David Vaughan, Drake Parker, Donald Parker, Drake Parkour, take your pick, was, as they say, known to the police. He was also known to a young woman called Meriel, the teaching assistant in the Science Department at Maxwell’s school. They had been together in the audience at Maxwell’s history talk.

Unusually for the series, it is not Maxwell’s detective brain that solves the crime here, but more a mixture of happenstance and downright stupidity on behalf of the criminals. Readers who want to read more by this very prolific author might like to check out his other series, such as his Margaret Murray mysteries, or the Grand & Batchelor thrillers. He has also written non-fiction books about infamous crimes such as the Whitechapel murders and the Meon Hill murder of 1947.

Maxwell’s Enigma is witty, deftly written and thoroughly English. It is published by Joffe Books and is available now.