Phil Rickman Livres

With the flood water washing up Church Lane towards the vicarage and the shop running out of cigarettes it looks like a cold and complex Christmas for Merrily Watkins in an ancient community forced to untangle its own history against the swirling uncertainty of the future.

When autumn storms blast Hereford, centuries-old human bones are found among the roots of a tree blown down on the city's Castle Green. But why have they been stolen? At the nearby Cathedral, another storm is building around a modernizing bishop who believes that if the Church is to survive it must phase out irrelevant archaic practices. Not good news for Merrily Watkins, consultant on the paranormal or, as it used to be known, diocesan exorcist. Especially as she's now presented with the job at its most medieval. In the moody countryside on the edge of Wales, a rambling 12th-century house is thought to be haunted. Although its new owners don't believe in ghosts, they do believe in spiritual darkness and the need for an exorcism. But their approach to Merrily is oblique and guarded. No one can be told—least of all, the new bishop. Merrily's discovery of the house's links with the medieval legend of a man who resisted mortality threatens to expose the hidden history of a more modern cult and its trail of insidious abuse—a trail that may not be closed.

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The seventh instalment in the Merrily Watkins series: The Parish Priest must solve the mystery of a young boy's deathly fall from the Ludlow Castle ruins, and discovers a hidden obsession with the afterlife amongst the ancient streets...

The fourth instalment in the Merrily Watkins series: A school girl possessed by evil spirits and a savage murder; Merrily is once again drawn into the deadly tangle of deceit and mystery in rural Herefordshire...

The fifth instalment in the Merrily Watkins series: Merrily must unearth the mysteries of the decaying village of Underhowle, and tackle a particularly stubborn Detective Inspector who strays off course...

NOW A MAJOR ITV DRAMA The Master House, close to the Welsh border, is medieval and slowly falling into ruins. Now the house and its surrounding land have been sold to the Duchy of Cornwall. But the Duchy's plans to renovate the house and its outbuildings are frustrated when the specialist builder refuses to work there. 'This is a place,' he tells the Prince's land-steward, 'that doesn't want to be restored.' Directed by the Bishop of Hereford to investigate, deliverance consultant Merrily Watkins discovers ancient connections between the house and the nearby church, built by the Knights Templar whose shadow still envelopes isolated Garway Hill and its scattered communities. Why did all the local inns have astrological names? What deep history lies behind the vicious feud between two local families? And what happened here to intimidate even the great Edwardian ghost-story writer M R James? When Merrily learns that she - and even her daughter, Jane - are under surveillance by the security services, she's ready to quit. But a sudden death changes everything, and she returns to Garway to uncover fibres of fear and hatred stitched into history and now insidiously twisted in the corridors - and the cloisters - of power.

The eleventh instalment in the Merrily Watkins series: With the framework of her own world beginning to crack, Merrily must venture into areas of mystery and menace; the secrets of the border's pagan past...

A perfectly preserved Celtic warrior is found in a peat bog, but his exhumation seems to trigger a wave of accidents and bad luck in the area. Are supernatural forces at work?.