The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

Description

There were certain phrases you could feel, like fingers up your spine. Hattie Chancery's room. The possessive. Present tense. Oh God. At Stanner Hall, a Victorian mansion-turned-hotel, Ben Foley hosts murder-mystery weekends and strives to prove that his hotel is the house on which Arthur Conan Doyle based his immortal Baskerville Hall. As the days shorten and the weather worsens, Foley's dabbling uncovers more than he can handle. For the history of Stanner Hall is linked not only to the Victorian fascination with spiritualism and the legacy of a terrifying medieval exorcism - but with a chain of deaths that is far from fictional.

Phil Rickman lives on the Welsh border where he writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales. He is the hugely popular author of The Bones of Avalon and the Merrily Watkins Mysteries.

Merrily has become an ever more engaging protagonist, a passionate, flawed modern women every bit as concerned with the intricacies of crime as she is with demons that go bump in the night. -- Geoffrey Wansell * Daily Mail * . . . the dark no man's land where murder mingles with superstition, genetics and the twisted conditioning of unhappy families. Complex, absorbing, fascinating . . . * Andrew Taylor * I absolutely loved this. For me it is the first modern book that I've found as satisfying as a Victorian novel. The layers, the characters, the humour, the spookiness - perfect. * Elly Griffiths *