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    The Judgement of Strangers
    The Judgement of Strangers
    The Judgement of Strangers
    Ebook388 pages5 hours

    The Judgement of Strangers

    By Andrew Taylor

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The second novel in Andrew Taylor’s ground-breaking Roth trilogy, which was adapted into the acclaimed drama Fallen Angel. A haunting thriller for fans of S J Watson.

    It is 1970. David Byfield, a widowed parish priest with a dark past and a darker future, brings home a new wife to Roth. Throughout the summer, the consequences of the marriage reverberate through a village now submerged in a sprawling London suburb.

    Blinded by lust, Byfield is oblivious to the dangers that lie all about him: the menopausal churchwarden with a hopeless passion for her priest; his beautiful, neglected teenage daughter Rosemary; and the sinister presence of Frances Youlgreave – poet, opium addict and suicide – whose power stretches beyond the grave.

    Soon the murders and blasphemies begin. But does the responsibility lie in the present or the past? And can Byfield, a prisoner of his own passion, break through to the truth before the final tragedy destroys what he most cherishes?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJun 20, 2013
    ISBN9780007502028
    The Judgement of Strangers
    Author

    Andrew Taylor

    Andrew Taylor is the author of a number of crime novels, including the ground-breaking Roth Trilogy, which was adapted into the acclaimed drama Fallen Angel, and the historical crime novels The Ashes of London, The Silent Boy, and The American Boy, a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller and a 2005 Richard & Judy Book Club Choice. He has won many awards, including the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award (the only author to win it three times) and the CWA’s prestigious Diamond Dagger.

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    • 4/5
      Love this book.
    • 5/5
      If you've already read The Four Last Things you've had exposure to four of the main characters in this story, the second volume of the "Roth Trilogy." So as not to spoil anything in this or the other two books, I will not say who's who.This story is told from the third-person perspective. Unlike the first book, which was a taut thriller, this book is - at the beginning - a story about a minister who has been assigned to an out-of-the-way town church, where he lives with his daughter. The story takes place 20 years before The Four Last Things, so we get to understand why certain things were they way they were in the earlier story. That's the interesting part of a series of stories that take place in reverse order: the subsequent books give historical insight into the previous story.There is an air of inevitability to this book that keeps the reader moving through the story, and although the story is not as taut as the first, it is far more satisfying in the development of its characters. This book is a well written, intriguing mystery that is kind of hard to put down.
    • 5/5
      Once I started listening to this, from somewhere the vague knowledge surfaced that it was part of Taylor's Roth trilogy. In fact, I know I had intended to read the trilogy once and here I was listening to #2 in the series.It is ten years since his first wife died and David Byfield has been celibate all that time, focussing his attention on bringing up his daughter Rosemary, who is now getting ready for her university entrance exams. Rosemary is resentful of her new step-mother Vanessa, and Vanessa has no intention of being simply a vicar's wife. She has a successful career in publishing and has no intention of abandoning it.Roth Park, the manor house near the vicarage, has recently been bought by Toby Clifford and his sister Joanna. They have hopes of turning it into a classy hotel.The village of Roth, on the outskirts of London, and being brought closer to the city by a motorway, is about to have the church fete and on night of the fete everything comes to a climax.THE JUDGEMENT OF OTHERS is a deceptive mixture of saga, village cozy, romance, and crime novel with a slight touch of the paranormal.Sometimes you feel sorry for David Byfield, at other times you feel like shaking him.My rating: 4.4I remember hearing Andrew Taylor talking at a Writers Festival (perhaps Adelaide some years back) talking about the Roth trilogy.There are 3 books in the trilogy:1. The Four Last Things (1997)2. The Judgement of Strangers (1998)3. The Office of the Dead (2000)and then they were published as Requiem for an Angel (omnibus) (2002) aka Fallen AngelThe blurb for the latter gives a clue about the structure of the trilogy:Beginning, in "The Four Last Things", with the abduction of little Lucy Appleyard and a grisly discovery in a London graveyard, the layers of the past are gradually peeled away through "The Judgement of Strangers" and "The Office of the Dead" to unearth the roots of a very immediate horror.Well, it has me hooked. I'm going to listen to THE FOUR LAST THINGS next.

    Book preview

    The Judgement of Strangers - Andrew Taylor

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