The Judgement of Strangers

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The second novel of the 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, opium addict and suicide. And there are the children at the Vicarage: Michael Appleyard, a watchful boy with a taste for Sherlock Holmes, and Rosemary, Byfield'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.