The Northumberland of Karen Charlton’s Detective Lavender Books: “A Lawless, Godless No-man’s Land”

British writer Karen Charlton is the author of a pair of novels featuring  Detective Lavender and set in early nineteenth-century Northumberland. The first, Catching the Eagle, is a fictionalized account of an actual crime and trial that involved her husband’s ancestors. A robbery at a country house brings Stephen Lavender of the Bow Street magistrate’s court in London to the scene to investigate. London’s Daily Mail had high praise for this series opener, noting, “Told with gritty realism, Catching The Eagle is a suspense-filled page-turner, which spares nothing in its descriptions of the hardships and injustices suffered by the poor at the turn of the 19th century.“ Charlton has just released the second in the series, The Missing Heiress. 

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