The judgement of strangers - Andrew Taylor

'Andrew Taylor digs deep to explore the tangled roots of sex, violence and religion. This is a fine thriller, with clues complex enough to tax a Morse.' Reginald Hill (on The Four Last Things)

The second novel in the Roth Trilogy is the story of David Byfield, a widowed parish priest with a dark past and a darker future. Set in 1970 in a commuter village near London, the novel explores the consequences of Byfield's second marriage.

Roth is not so much a village as a suburban state of mind. But the past clings, and still has the power to affect the present. The menopausal Audrey Oliphant, churchwarden and spinster, nurses a hopeless passion for her parish priest. Lady Youlgreave slides towards death, in the company of her equally senile dogs, Beauty and Beast. The big house, now a wreck of its former grandeur, has been sold to a pair of hippies, brother and sister, who have their own secrets and their own power to disturb. The vicar's new wife is fascinated by a Victorian poet-priest with local connections - Francis Youlgreave, author of The Judgement of Strangers; an opium addict and suicide. There are children at the Vicarage - Michael Appleyard, a watchful boy with a taste for Sherlock Holmes; and Rosemary, David's teenage daughter, as beautiful - and as strange - as an angel. Then the murders begin, and the mutilations, and the echoes of past crimes and blasphemies.