Wells
England's smallest city, a cathedral that has been holding itself up for seven hundred years, and the patch of DI Eleanor Brand.
Where the books are set
Every one of Matthew Palmer's mysteries is rooted in a real place: a cathedral city, a moor, a stretch of reclaimed marsh. Here is the history behind each one, and the book to start with.
Bath
Hot springs the Romans built a temple round, an abbey with angels climbing its walls, and a body in the Great Bath at dawn.
Salisbury
Britain's tallest spire, one of the four original copies of Magna Carta, and a cathedral close that has kept its own counsel for eight hundred years.
Norfolk
Round-towered churches, lost manor houses and villages with long memories: the county where the Heritage Crime Files begin.
Bodmin Moor
Granite tors, abandoned mines and the lake where Excalibur went back to the water: the wildest country in Cornwall.
The Fens
Land taken from the sea and the marsh, flat to every horizon, and kept dry only by engineering and money.
The Gwent Levels
Reclaimed marshland on the edge of the Severn, crossed by drainage ditches the locals call reens and held back from the sea by walls whose story goes back to the Romans.
Pendle Hill
A long dark hill in Lancashire, and the most famous witch trial in English history.
A free Eleanor Brand story
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