Sarah Hawkswood Books in Order

If you want the very start of the story: Servant of Death → Ordeal by Fire → Marked to Die
If you want the core trio working together: Ordeal by Fire → Vale of Tears → River of Sins
If you like wintery, high-pressure cases: Hostage to Fortune → Wolf at the Door → A Shroud of Snow
If you'd rather sample a later case first: A Taste for Killing → Too Good to Hang → Litany of Lies

Sarah Hawkswood studied Modern History at Oxford, and that grounding in the past shows up on every page she writes. Before turning fully to fiction, she built a working life around research, archives, and the kind of detail that helps an old world feel solid rather than decorative.

History came first.

At St Hugh's College she focused on Military History and Theory of War. After university she worked in a regimental museum, wrote educational material for Salisbury Cathedral, catalogued weapons from muskets to missiles, and carried out research for the Royal Marines Museum. It is a varied list, but it explains a lot about the confidence and practical texture of her historical fiction.

After time out as a full-time mother, she returned to research and published From Trench and Turret in 2006 under her maiden name, S. M. Holloway. By then fiction was already pulling at her. She has said that creating a believable world matters to her, and that care with setting and context became the backbone of her novels.

The name Sarah Hawkswood is a pen name, taken from an eighteenth-century Worcestershire ancestor and chosen in part because the initials matched her maiden name. The books that made the name stick are the Bradecote and Catchpoll mysteries, her first novels, set in Worcestershire during the civil war years of King Stephen's reign. They begin with Servant of Death, where Hugh Bradecote and Serjeant Catchpoll are thrown together to investigate a killing at Pershore Abbey. In Ordeal by Fire, fires spread fear through Worcester, while later books such as River of Sins, A Taste for Killing, and Litany of Lies show how comfortably she moves between village gossip, church politics, and straight-up murder.

What readers often respond to is the balance. The plots are intricate without turning fussy, and the history is rich without reading like homework. There is dry humor in the partnership between the thoughtful Bradecote, the shrewd and practical Catchpoll, and, later, the younger Walkelin, but there is also a clear interest in harder questions about power, loyalty, and the gap between law and justice. She is good, too, on the small frictions of everyday life, class, marriage, money, obligation, and the awkwardness of people who need one another but do not always agree.

Place matters here.

Hawkswood uses Worcestershire as more than a backdrop. Abbeys, forests, riverbanks, salt roads, market towns, and manor houses all shape the books, and so do the pressures of the age, uneasy loyalties, church authority, rough justice, and the daily business of survival. Even when the stories deal with poisoning, arson, robbery, or treason, they keep a human scale. People in these novels work, bargain, grieve, pray, and make bad decisions for reasons that feel painfully believable.

She also writes Regency romance as Sophia Holloway, which gives you a neat sense of her range. One side of her work leans into mud, mistrust, and twelfth-century crime, the other into manners, wit, and emotional missteps in a later period. She has said she enjoys switching between the two. Now based in Worcestershire, married, and the mother of two grown children, she continues to write while staying close to the landscape that suits her best. She is also a member of the Crime Writers' Association, the Historical Writers' Association, and the Historical Novel Society.