The best historical thrillers for history lovers

Having brought us Fatherland (which deserves its own entry, of course) Robert Harris’s new thriller is set in the 1660s and centres on the hunt for the regicides, the men who signed the death warrant of King Charles I in 1649. The story focuses on two regicides in particular – Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, William Goffe, who fled to the Puritan colonies of New England to escape capture. The dark heart of the story is a fictional official named Richard Naylor – a man with a grudge who leads the hunt for Whalley and Goffe and pursues them for years... what follows is a gripping tale of cat and mouse, full action – The Fugitive meets The Revenant. 

Famous for his crookbacked sleuth Shardlake series, CJ Sansom sets this standalone counter-factual historical thriller in 1950s Britain – one where the United Kingdom had capitulated to Nazi Germany in 1940 (with Lord Halifax and not Winston Churchill becoming prime minister) and has become a German client state. It conjures up the 1950s – the smog, the coal smoke, the tea shops – while sketching out an alternate reality, one which is highly plausible, thereby doing one of the things I love best about historical fiction – showing us how different things could easily have been and shaking us from any complacency. More than this, Dominion is a highly effective thriller, as civil servant David Fitzgerald becomes the man in the middle of a politico-spy page-turner that keeps you guessing till the end.

In this first of Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee series we meet his super protagonists, officers in the Imperial Police Force, and their setting – 1920s Calcutta during the days of the high Raj. Wyndham, a damaged British First World War veteran and Banerjee, his Bengali sergeant, navigate a complex world of politics and crime in this incredibly impressive debut – one which has established Mukherjee as a rising man of historical crime fiction himself.  

Set in the aftermath of the English Civil War; this is the fourth in Andrew Taylor’s bestselling series involving a government agent named James Marwood and his friend, Cat Lovett, who happens to be Oliver Cromwell’s daughter. In The Last Protector 1668 and Marwood and Lovett are on the trail of a mystery that goes back to the days of the republic, one quite literally hidden away in the bowels of the past, but also one which involves a very credible danger to both them individually and society at large. It’s gripping and immersive, and offers delicious personal and political jeopardy right up to the end.

This is the first in Antonia Hodgson’s so-good-you-could-eat-it Thomas Hawkins series. It’s set in London in 1727 and the plot revolves around a likeable rake, Hawkins, whose dedication to dice, booze, and women leads him to ruin – but with the help of others. Finding himself in the notorious Marshalsea Prison – think Alcatraz but without the water and with leprosy and lice instead – and you have the makings of a wonderful prison-break type story. Hodgson’s characters – Hawkins, but also his love interest, Kitty Sparks – aren’t just alive but bring the past alive with them. It’s like Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones with the vividness of the Sixties, but then, if you know anything about eighteenth-century London, you’ll know that it was pretty wild place. This, after all, was long before the Victorians came along with their rather puritan social mores.