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The twelfth instalment in the Merrily Watkins series: When a man´s body is discovered near the picturesque town of Hay-on-Wye, his death appears to be ´unnatural´ in every sense. Merrily Watkins is drafted in to investigate.

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When a man´s body is discovered near the picturesque town of Hay-on-Wye, his death appears to be ´unnatural´ in every sense. Merrily Watkins is drafted in to investigate.

´Rickman´s writing style reflects his subject matter: spooky and indirect, elegantly crafted but always a sense of shadow behind you, that you´ve missed something you should have seen.´ - New York Review Of Books

´The wind was rising. A smokey cloud-mass shaped like a rabbit made a forward bound in slow motion and came apart over Hay Castle a mile away on the horizon . . .´

Hay-on-Wye: the Welsh-border town that became world-famous for declaring independence and crowning its own king. But now black clouds are gathering, to meet rising shadows from the past. As the town fights for its future, a man drowns in a deep pool below a waterfall, a woman disappears, and diocesan exorcist Merrily Watkins - alone and vulnerable - uncovers a secret history of dark magic and ritual murder.

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Interweaves the threads of murder, police procedure, the power of landscape and faint but potent wisps of the supernatural to produce a literary cloth of gold. A unique talent in cracking form. Crime Fiction Lover

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Rickman, Phil
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, The Heresy of Dr Dee and the Merrily Watkins Mysteries.

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