The Roth Trilogy
3 primary works • 5 total works Complete
Book 1
`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
Little Lucy Appleyard is snatched from her child minder's on a cold winter afternoon, and the nightmare begins. When Eddie takes her home to beautiful, child-loving Angel, he knows he's done the right thing. But Lucy's not like their other visitors, and unwittingly she strikes through Angel's defences to something both vulnerable and volatile at the core.
To the outside world Lucy has disappeared into a black hole with no clues to her whereabouts...until the first grisly discovery in a London graveyard. More such finds are to follow, all at religious sites, and, in a city haunted by religion, what do these offerings signify?
All that stands now between Lucy and the final sacrifice are a CID sergeant on the verge of disgrace and a woman cleric - Lucy's parents - but how can they hope to halt the evil forces that are gathering around their innocent daughter?
Book 2
‘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.
Book 3
The final volume in the acclaimed Roth Trilogy, which, like an archaeological dig, strips away the layers of a psychopath’s history: ‘Taylor has established a sound reputation for writing tense, clammy novels that perceptively penetrate the human psyche’ – Marcel Berlins, The Times
It’s 1958, and the party’s over for Wendy Appleyard: she finds herself penniless, jobless and on the brink of divorce. Who better to come to her rescue than her oldest friend, Janet Byfield?
So Wendy goes to stay with Janet, who seems to have everything Wendy lacks: a handsome husband, a lovely little daughter, Rosie, and a beautiful home in the Cathedral Close of Rosington. David Byfield is on the verge of promotion, and Janet is the perfect wife for an ambitious young clergyman.
But perfection has always been dangerous, and gradually the idyll sours. Old sins come to haunt the present and breed new sins in their place. The shadow of death seeps through the Close, and with it comes the double mystery stretching back to turn-of-the-century Rosington, to a doomed poet-priest called Francis Youlgreave.
Only Wendy, the outsider looking in, glimpses the truth. But can she grasp its dark and twisted logic in time to prevent the coming tragedy.
The Office of the Dead is a chilling novel of crime and retribution, and is the third volume of Andrew Taylor’s stunning and acclaimed Roth Trilogy.
Like an archaeological dig, The Roth Trilogy strips away the past to reveal the menace lurking in the present: ‘Taylor has established a sound reputation for writing tense, clammy novels that perceptively penetrate the human psyche’ – Marcel Berlins, The Times
The shadow of past evil hangs over the present in Andrew Taylor's Roth Trilogy as he skilfully traces the influences that have come to shape the mind of a psychopath.
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 dark and twisted roots of a very immediate horror that threatens to explode the serenity of Rosington's peaceful Cathedral Close.
The thrilling and powerful psychological trilogy, reissued to coincide with a major 3 part TV adaptation, Fallen Angel, starring Charles Dance and Emilia Fox, from the bestelling author of `The American Boy'.
`Nobody's perfect,' says a little girl in a walled garden.
Certainly not the child stolen from a shabby London street. Or the sexually frustrated suburban vicar. Or least of all, perhaps, the woman who runs out of good times and comes to perch like a cuckoo in the bosom of a perfect family.
Fallen Angel uncovers the secret history of a murderer, tracing the full damage and horror of an unforgiving killer over forty years. A chilling account of one family's self-destruction, the story slowly strips away the past, like an archaeological dig into the very nature of evil.