Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62183 in Books
• Published on: 2000-03-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

Synopsis
When offered the post once styled 'diocesan exorcist', the Revd Merrily Watkins - parish priest and single parent - cannot easily refuse. But the retiring exorcist, strongly objecting to women priests, not only refuses to help Merrily but ensures that she's soon exposed to the job at its most terrifying. And things get no easier. As an early winter slices through the old city of Hereford, a body is found in the River Wye, an ancient church is desecrated, and there are signs of dark ritual on a hill overlooking the city. Meanwhile, reports of psychic unrest in the Cathedral itself - where the famous shrine of St Thomas Cantilupe lies in fragments - reflect an undying evil lying close to the heart of the Church itself.

From the Author
just for the record...
The problem is, if you write novels involving anything supernatural, they file you under horror. Now, I'll accept 'eerie', I'll go with 'chilling', but horror... I don't think so. Nor fantasy; I hate fantasy. I write thrillers with real people and an element of the supernatural. That's it. Anyway, a couple of years ago, I decided to do one that nobody would ever slot into the dark space between Stephen King and Anne Rice. This was The Wine of Angels, a village mystery with murder, missing girls, incest, cider and a ghost. The book's central character was a female vicar, Merrily Watkins. I liked her and thought she deserved a series. So, Midwinter of the Spirit is the one in which Merrily becomes diocesan exorcist (or deliverance minister, as they term it these days} for Hereford. It's a little darker than Wine, but still essentially a crime-based thriller with a vein of supernatural - a 'spiritual procedural', if you like. Probably the first-ever. The third in the series, A Crown of Lights - the story of a modern witch-hunt on the Welsh border - is out in February 2001. It isn't horror either. But a little scary? Quite possibly.

Customer Reviews

An interesting combination of religion and new age spirituality
This was the first Phil Rickman novel I had read and most certainly won't be the last. I could barely put it down. It skillfully brings together aspects of religion and new age spirituality whilst also being a first class good old fashioned mystery of the Agatha Christie style.

Creepy
This is great. I love the characters as they are so real, like Merrily and Jane (although the bishop was a bit one-dimensional). The story was gripping although I had to concentrate as there were many facets to it. I also loved the way the Church is utilised, as I think it would be too scary without this comfort. In modern writing, Christianity is seen as narrow minded and paganism and New Age as open. I like that Rickman doesn't bother about this political correctness and, although he exposes faults within the church, he is not using his writing as a means to belittle Christianity. A really enjoyable and thrilling read.

A Killer Thriller Chiller
When I first heard there was to be a sequel to `The Wine of Angels' I was intrigued as to what kind of spin Phil Rickman was planning for prolonging the literary life of Merrily Watkins. Let's face it, when you're writing mystery thrillers with a supernatural edge and the main character is a novice female Vicar, your options are always going to be decidedly limited. So how does Rickman solve the problem? He hands Merrily the role of Diocesan Exorcist - and what looks like a narrow playing field suddenly expands to Grand Canyon proportions.

`Mid Winter of the Spirit' starts with Merrily receiving training for her new post in the Deliverance Office. Insidiously creepy stuff. It changes the reader's context of what is fictional and what is not - blurring the lines between real evil and the artificial villainy fabricated for the sole purpose of selling novels. Scary or not, just think how much fun it would be if they replaced `Hells Kitchen' with `Exorcist School'. We could vote off inept Priests who bungle their exorcisms and end up with pea soup on their vestments.

Once Merrily is declared fit for action she finds herself to be a political pawn in a game of ecumenical chess run by the power hungry Bishop of Hereford and she receives no help from the outward bound Exorcist-in-charge, Canon Dobbs who refuses point blank to even speak to Merrily never mind show her the tricks of the trade. He even goes so far as to ensure that Merrily is exposed to raw, festering evil in the shape of Denzil Joy. It gets worse for Merrily when daughter Jane once again chooses the wrong people to hang out with and is sucked into a Pagan worship group, generating a domestic conflict that almost destroys Merrily's already fragile relationship with her daughter. Aside from this there's the small matter of a malevolent spirit in the Cathedral and Merrily finding herself targeted in the cross hairs of a Satanic group who view her as a vulnerable link in the Church's last line of defence.

A highly original mixture of the `crime-mystery thriller' and `hair-raising chiller' genres and places Phil Rickman way ahead of writers on either side of these borders. A great book.