Having written five books about young men, back to back, (the first four Teifi Valley Coroner novels plus The Black and The White, I decided that I wanted to write a series with a female main protagonist. My publisher suggested that I might think of setting the new series in Oxford and, as far as I was concerned, historical crime fiction + female protagonist means only one time – the beginning of the women’s college movement. It has everything – conflict, seismic change, misogyny, female empowerment, suffragism… and did I mention conflict?

But I’m a Welsh writer, in fact I’m a founding member of Wales’s crime fiction collective, Crime Cymru, so I didn’t want to abandon Wales, or the Teifi Valley. So I took the Teifi Valley with me to Oxford in the form of Rhiannon ‘Non’ Vaughan, an intelligent, feisty young woman who runs headlong into Oxford’s genteel middle-class respectability and refuses to conform. Non is a fiery redhead who rides around Oxford on a tandem tricycle which she won in a bet (of course she did…).

And, needing somebody to put the slightly more conventional side of the Oxford story, I gave her a co-conspirator in the form of Basil Rice, also Welsh but from the more anglicised Monmouthshire. Basil is, to all intents and purposes, an establishment figure. He’s a don at Jesus College and has impeccable middle class credentials. But Basil is not entirely what he seems because he has a very well-kept secret: he’s gay in a time when male homosexual acts were punishable by imprisonment with hard labour, not to mention loss of all respectablity.

Together, Non and Basil keep getting involved with suspicious deaths. And Non navigates the tricky course she’s set herself as a female student of a university which isn’t really sure that it wants women…

Read about Non and Basil’s exploits and the Oxford of the 1880s in the following books: