The Judgement of Strangers: Roth Trilogy Book 2 (The Roth Trilogy)

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.

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