The Arcane Pen and Key

Matthew Palmer

Crime and mystery

Cathedral closes, Fenland conspiracies and the institutions that close ranks.

Matthew Palmer writes British crime fiction set in places that keep their secrets: the cathedral closes of Wells, Bath and Salisbury, a Norfolk village, Bodmin Moor, the Fens of East Anglia and the drained marshes of the Gwent Levels.

His detectives rarely face a lone killer. More often they come up against an institution protecting itself: a diocese guarding its founding myths, a heritage foundation with something to hide, a corporation that has rigged the data. The investigations are character-driven at heart, using evidence and inquiry to reach the fractures inside a family, a village, a department or a belief.

He lives in the South West of England.

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Latest: 18 October 2026

The Reen Ledger

A standalone novel

Callum Vance, forensic auditor and former reconnaissance specialist, comes home to the Gwent Levels after his brother Leo is found dead at the Goldcliff pump house. Officially it was suicide in open water. Cal knew his brother too well to believe it.

Moving from the data to the dykes, sluices and tide tables of the Levels, he uncovers chemical dumping hidden in the spring tides, and a community, his own cousin among them, prepared to bury the truth to protect a four-hundred-million-pound drainage merger.

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The books

The Lanternlight Cases

Ecclesiastical mysteries set in the cathedral cities of the South West. DI Eleanor Brand of Wells, raised in a vicarage and fluent in the Church's polite silences, investigates deaths that cathedral and diocese would rather call accidents. DS Matthew Thresher works beside her.

Detectives
DI Eleanor Brand and DS Matthew Thresher
Setting
Wells, Bath and Salisbury
  1. Book 1 Murder at St Cedds
  2. Book 2 In the Abbeys Shadow
  3. Book 3 Blood in the Mortar

The Heritage Files

DI Daniel Harcourt and DS Lucy Redgrave of the Heritage Crime Division investigate cases rooted in land, money and long village memories, while investigative journalist Charlie Fitz-Gerald, and his spaniel Reggie, work the same ground from the inside.

Detectives
DI Daniel Harcourt and DS Lucy Redgrave, with journalist Charlie Fitz-Gerald
Setting
Norfolk and Bodmin Moor
  1. Book 1 The Shadows of Hawthorn Vale
  2. Book 2 The Secrets of Bodmin Moor

Wychwood on Lea

Celia Hertley, the village mortician, notices what the bodies say after everyone else has settled on an accident.

Investigator
Celia Hertley, mortician
Setting
The village of Wychwood-on-Lea
  1. Book 1 An Autopsy of Lies

The Meridian Files

DI Clare Cassidy and DS Ray Okoro investigate staged deaths and corporate fraud across the Fens of East Anglia, where the numbers don't lie but the people who audit them do.

Detectives
DI Clare Cassidy and DS Ray Okoro
Setting
The Fens and the Wash
  1. Book 1 The Meridian Files
  2. In preparation Cold Harbour

Standalone

A thriller outside the series.

  1. October 2026 The Reen Ledger

How he writes

Palmer treats setting as built environment rather than backdrop. Institutions, architecture, weather and local history all press on the people moving through the story.

Each mystery is about more than who did it. It is about what has to stay hidden for a system to survive, and what it costs the people who refuse to let it.

Influences

  • Cathedral architecture
  • British crime fiction
  • Forensic investigation
  • The rural English landscape
  • Cultural memory

Recurring ground

  • Cathedral cities of Somerset and Wiltshire
  • Norfolk villages and the Fens
  • Cornwall's moors and mines
  • The Gwent Levels and the Severn
  • Archives, mortuaries and planning offices