The Judgement of Strangers (The Roth Trilogy, Book 2) - Hardcover

‘An intelligent, exciting psychological drama... A powerful feeling of something nasty just around the corner prevails... An unusual achievement’
Daily Mail

‘This author knows precisely how to wield suspense’
Independent on Sunday

‘Clammy... atmospheric... showing admirable control over matters psychological’
The Times

‘Taylor is a major thriller talent’
Time Out

‘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.