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Pagans

By: James Alistair Henry
Narrated by: Gunnar Cauthery
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TWO COPS. ONE KILLER. HUNDREDS OF GODS.

21st Century London — except the Norman conquest never happened. An uneasy alliance of ancient tribes has formed, but peace is threatened by a series of brutal murders. Detectives Aedith and Drustan must put aside their differences to track down a serial killer with a decades-old grudge.

©2025 Moonflower Books (P)2025 Moonflower Books Crime Fiction Dark Fantasy Fantasy Mystery Police Procedurals Crime England Murder Scary
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Loved it all - super action and gritty dialogue. Super performance by the reader -
Never over the top but each accent felt authentic.

Pacy, at times amusing. Loved the reader’s different accents!

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Looking at an alternate universe like this fella terribly accurate. Despite huge shifts in history, people would still be people. I like this recontextualising of our world through different lenses. My usual genre is science fiction and fantasy, and this book has been a revelation of different ways of doing it.

Plus it's a good story!

People are people, no matter what

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Absolutely loved this. This is pagan Britain and it is mightily interesting. Tribes, clans, tattoos and multiple gods in what would otherwise be modern Britain. The main protagonists come from different points of the not united kingdom and there are tantalising references to Tsarists, Caliphate and the superpower seems to be African. Murder mystery meets political intrigue and fantasy and with lot of sass into the mix. Brilliant.

Great new world

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I am DELIGHTED to learn that there is a sequel in the works; I earnestly hope that this becomes a series on the same scale as Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London.

So: this is a police procedural with a twist: it’s set in a vividly realised Alternate Timeline where modern Britain is a barbaric little island full of squabbling tribes, with no history of empire-building under its belt. (At a guess I’d say that this timeline perhaps splits off from ours somewhere before the conversion of Emperor Constantine, because this is a world where Christianity never swept the globe, and remains an extremely niche cult.)

Henry sets the scene with his opening chapter, which introduces us effectively to his world: a honeymooning couple from West Africa have ventured far from the safety and civilisation of home to rough it among the quaint tribal Britons, and they stumble across a corpse nailed to a tree. This drops us into a story that blends serial killer investigation with political machinations, all set in a world that cannily blends the strange and the familiar. Our protagonists live in a racially diverse British Isles with mobile phones, wifi, social media, cars, genre TV shows, takeaway food and drones, but it’s also a world of tribal rivalry, blood feuds, ritual sacrifice and poetry.

This book is very much its own thing, don’t get me wrong, and it’s fleshed out with myriad richly evocative details, but more than anything it reminds me of the worldbuilding of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses. It isn’t THE SAME, by any means - this Britain is not a colonised outpost run by PanAfricans, but it IS a Britain which is palpably on the outskirts, a warlike island surrounded by mighty empires and global powers, whose culture and technology permeate and influence daily life in this cold, overcast outpost. (I’m a trifle too old to have read Noughts and Crosses as a kid, but I caught the TV adaptation a couple of years ago and ADORED the meticulously thought out world-building. The starcrossed teen romance was fine, don’t get me wrong, but it was the politics and all the sociocultural stuff that I found fascinating, so for me this is PERFECT.)

The characters are engaging and their case pleasingly convoluted, but the star of the show is the worldbuilding. It’s a window into a fascinating alternate timeline that I look forward to revisiting. 10/10, no notes.

Line of Duty meets Beowulf.

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I only knew about this book because of someone else's enthusiastic recommendation. I'm so glad I did - it's a great read.

In a modern England lacking Roman and Noman French influences, the Saxons reign supreme. Out west, it's more Celts; in a walled-off Scotland, Picts. Funny and well-researched, the story also throws a different light on all kinds of actual modern happenings, societal attitudes, and generally, what is it is to be English.

The two central characters are a good match for each other. The plot is twisty and veers between Saxon mores and the world as we know it in a way that both bewilders and fascinates. The whole thing works wonderfully. I hope there is more to come.

Gunnar Cauthery reads well. Only a few editing mishaps disrupted the flow.

Wonderfully entertaining

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