This month, the past and present collide in murder investigations in modern-day England and Puerto Rico.
Bog Queen: A Novel
Anna North (Bloomsbury Publishing, 288 pp., $28.99, October 2025)
Bog Queen, Anna North’s fourth novel, is many things: an intricate work of historical fiction, a tightly woven mystery reminiscent of the police procedural Bones, and perhaps most of all, a transfixing excavation of the competing interests converging on the natural world in our present moment of ecological devastation, economic precarity, and historical forgetting.
North’s novel is set between two periods: England in 2018, where Agnes, an American forensic anthropologist, is working in the market town of Ludlow to uncover what happened to a 2,000-year-old corpse recently unearthed from a peat bog; and ancient Britain, where a young druid from the town journeys to Camulodunum (modern-day Colchester), the capital of Roman Britain, and back.
The chapters alternate between the two women’s stories, which each capture a pivotal moment in the town’s history.
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