Susanna Gregory is the pseudonym of Elizabeth Cruwys, a Cambridge academic who was previously a coroner's officer. She writes detective fiction, and is noted for her series of medieval mysteries featuring Matthew Bartholomew, a teacher of medicine and investigator of murders in 14th-century Cambridge.
Though the books may have some aspects in common with the Ellis Peters Cadfael series (an amateur and reluctant sleuth sceptical of superstition and somewhat ahead of his time) the tone and subject matter of the Gregory novels is far darker and does not shirk from portraying the harsh realities of life in the Middle Ages. The first in the series, A Plague on both your Houses is set against the ravages of the Black Death and subsequent novels take much of their subject matter from the attempts of society to recover from this disaster.
These novels bear the marks of much detailed research into medieval conditions - one feels that many of the supporting characters have names taken from the documentation of the time - and well evoke the squalor of the Middle Ages; the struggle between traditional leechcraft and the dawning of evidence-based medicine is a common bone of contention between Matthew and the students he teaches at Michaelhouse College (now part of Trinity College, Cambridge), whilst the conflict between the students of Cambridge and the townsfolk is always ready to erupt into violence.
Another series of books titled "Chaloner", set just after the Restoration of Charles II and featuring Thomas Chaloner, detective and former spy, began with A Conspiracy of Violence published in January 2006, and continues with Blood on the Strand, published in January 2007.