The Judgement of Strangers - Softcover

Taylor, Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312287305 ISBN 13: 9780312287306

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 2003

Synopsis

Andrew Taylor probes the secret history of murder, delving deep into the past to find the origins of a serial killer in his second novel of the Roth Trilogy. The Judgement of Strangers is the story of David Byfield, a widowed parish priest with a dark past and a darker future.

The suburban town of Roth is haunted by its past, and struggling to break free. But by initiating a series of gruesome murders and mutilations, echoing crimes committed years before, someone in the village is trying to assure history's tight grip over the present. The community has no shortage of suspects, from the village vicar in the throes of a midlife crisis to the unusual brother and sister newly relocated to the town of Roth. Audrey Oliphant, churchwarden, spinster and secret admirer of the vicar, fancies herself as Miss Marple, and when the corpse of her cat, Lord Peter, is found nailed to the church door, she decides to investigate. By the end of her investigation, two people are dead, one is in jail, and a fourth is insane.

About this title

Review

There's a wonderfully sly, almost mocking overtone to this middle part of a mystery trilogy by British master Andrew Taylor. As the narrator--a pompous, self-pitying clergyman named David Byfield--says about a dinner engagement: "As a consequence of my accepting their invitation, two people died, a third went to prison, and a fourth was admitted to a hospital for the insane." No beating about the bush there, or anywhere else in this story set in 1970 (25 years before the events of The Four Last Things, the first book in Taylor's trilogy about a fictional London suburb called Roth). The Judgement of Strangers helps explain what happens in the first book, but also stands on its own as a mordant mystery about sexual repression.

Byfield, a handsome widower with a psychologically fragile teenaged daughter, stirs up trouble with his attention to several women, all of whom pay a much higher price than he does. By making Byfield such a dolt, Taylor lets us sympathize with even the most odious of his conquests--Audrey, the obsessed local historian and operator of the world's nastiest teashop. "I watched the excitement draining from Audrey's face like water from a bath," Byfield tells us. "I felt ashamed of myself and also irritated with her. Why did she insist on calling Roth a village? It was a suburb of London, similar in all essentials to a dozen others. Most of its inhabitants had their real lives elsewhere. In Roth they merely serviced their bodily needs, watched television and on Sundays played golf or cleaned their Ford Cortinas." Book three promises to go back even further in time and tell us how Byfield's first wife died. --Dick Adler

About the Author

ANDREW TAYLOR is the author of several acclaimed novels, including the series of Lydmouth village mysteries and Caroline Minuscule, for which he received an Edgar nomination and Britain's John Creasey Award. He and his family live in the Forest of Dean in England.

About this edition

• Publisher: Minotaur Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312287305
• ISBN 13: 9780312287306
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304