Murder in a Cathedral (Signed First Printing)

For many years Westonbury Cathedral has been dominated by a clique of High Church gays, so when Norman Cooper, an austere, intolerant, happy-clappy evangelist, is appointed dean, there is shock, outrage and fear.David Elworthy, the gentle and politically innocent new bishop, is distraught at the prospect of warfare between the factions; contentious issues include the camp lady chapel and the gay memorial under construction in the deanery garden.Desperate for help, Elworthy cries on the shoulder of his old friend, the redoubtable Baroness Troutbeck, who forces her unofficial troubleshooter, Robert Amiss, to move into the bishop's palace.Amiss, Troutbeck and the cat Plutarch address themselves in their various ways to the bishop's problems, which very soon include a clerical corpse in the cathedral. Is it suicide? Or is it murder? And who is likely to be next?

Baroness Troutbeck--"Jack" to her friends--is the hard-drinking, hard-living lady of "a certain age" who stars in Ruth Dudley Edward's series of comic mysteries. In Murder in a Cathedral, the seventh installment, Jack persuades her impecunious friend Robert Amiss to take a job with her pal Canon Flubert, inadvertently sending him into a firestorm of ecclesiastical scandal: in a church run by gay priests, witches, and New Age enthusiasts, the appointment of a fundamentalist dean is anathema. When the dean turns up dead, everyone's a suspect. Bad enough that Amiss has to cope with the scandal, but soon he also has the Baroness on his hands in a madcap search for the Cathedral killer.