Pagans

by James Alistair Henry

Synopsis:

Two cops. One killer. Hundreds of gods.

21st Century London. The Norman conquest never happened. The ancient tribes of Britain remain undefeated. But murders still have to be solved.

The small, mostly unimportant, island of Britain is inhabited by an uneasy alliance of tribes - the dominant Saxon East, the beleaguered Celtic West, and an independent Nordic Scotland - and tensions are increasing by the second. Supermarket warpaint sales are at an all-time high, mead abuse shortens the lives of thousands, and social media is abuzz with conspiracy theories suggesting the High Table's putting GPS trackers in the honeycakes.

Amid this febrile atmosphere, the capital is set to play host to the Unification Summit, which aims to join together the various tribes into one 'united kingdom'. But when a Celtic diplomat is found brutally murdered, his body nailed to an ancient oak, the fragile peace is threatened. Captain Aedith Mercia, daughter of a powerful Saxon leader, must join forces with Celtic Tribal Detective Inspector Drustan to solve the murder - and stop political unrest spilling onto the streets.

But is this an isolated incident? Or are Aedith and Drustan facing a serial killer with a decades-old grudge? To find out, they must delve into their own murky pasts and tackle forces that go deeper than they ever could have imagined.

Set in a world that's far from our own and yet captivatingly familiar, Pagans explores contemporary themes of religious conflict, nationalism, prejudice... and the delicate internal politics of the office coffee round. Gripping and darkly funny, Pagans keeps you guessing until the very end.

James Henry Alistair’s Pagans is set in an interesting world in which the Norman invasion of 1066 never happened, and Britain is divided into Norse, Saxon and indigenous British contingents which don’t get along super great. Britain’s also a bit of a backwater, with geopolitics all flipped around from what we know — clearly a lot more than the Battle of Hastings did and didn’t happen/work out the way we know it. That’s never explored at great length, and is actually just the backdrop for a mystery.

This works… okay. I had so many questions, including a lot of them about the marginal (nearly unknown) nature of Christians in the story, given that the Norse, Saxons and native British, or at the very least subgroups thereof, all converted to Christianity at some point in their histories, without any need for the Normans to invade. It doesn’t make sense.

If you set that aside, and accept the idea of a modern Britain that’s Saxon, Norse and indigenous British (with heavy marginalisation for “the Indij”), there are some fun details about how this works and how people experience the world, some of which are semi-reasonable to consider having grown out of Saxon, Norse and British beliefs. If you accept the context, the mystery that plays out against it is a fun one, playing the groups against one another (while having them work together in the form of the police) and leading up to quite the climax.

I actually enjoyed Aedith and Drustan’s characters, and the supporting cast; as a mystery, and with them as the cops, it’s quite fun. I could never take it quite seriously, and some of the obvious flips from reality to do with marginalisation are a bit ham-handed, but I sat back and let it take me where it wanted to go, and it was an interesting ride.

Rating: 3/5 (“liked it”)