A Father Gilbert Mystery
1 primary work • 4 total works
Book 3
When Father Gilbert traded in his detective's badge for an Anglican priest's collar, he never expected he would be pulled into a different kind of mystery - the mystery of the spiritual world. Even attending a conference in a seaside town provides no escape as he has yet another supernatural encounter, this time with a murdered girl who worked at a local massage parlour. Details of the murder lead Father Gilbert to approach the police with clues in common with other cases, bringing him into contact with a detective from his days with Scotland Yard. Meanwhile, a local monastery has been vandalized, with grotesque images and profane graffiti defacing the altar and walls. The head of the monastery, from whom Father Gilbert received spiritual direction a couple of years before, is distressed by the attack, accusing the local sex trade industry of retaliating against his outspoken stand against it. Then, one of the brothers at the monastery is found dead in the local red light district. All evidence points to his having been a regular at a massage parlour - the same one where the murdered girl had worked. Intertwined within this web is a young woman who sees the same apparitions that Father Gilbert thought only he could see, plus an obstinate runaway, a distraught father, and a deep corruption pervading the town. And, whether he likes it or not, Father Gilbert is at the centre of it all.
A former Scotland Yard detective, Father Gilbert knows about death. But, as priest of a modest Anglican church in the small town of Hailsham, he didn't expect it to show up like this - in the suicide of a man who threw himself off the church tower, and in the discovery of a two-hundred-year-old body beneath an ancient bridge. The deaths are linked. The mummified corpse under the bridge, a murder victim, reignites a centuries-old battle between two local families - the Todds and the aristocratic Hayshams. Then both David Todd and Lord Haysham begin to act strangely. They are fearful for reasons they won't explain. When Lord Haysham is murdered, David Todd is the prime suspect. But Todd is acting maniacal, claiming great forces of evil are at work. An entire history of violence and depravity begins to emerge - interweaving the history of several local families with a secret occult society that engages in Black Masses. Has the Society emerged again?
