THE OFFICE OF THE DEAD

Taylor completes his unique reverse trilogy, which began in 1995 with The Four Last Things (1997) and traveled back to 1970 with The Judgment of Strangers (1998), in this deceptively quiet cathedral mystery, set in 1957–58, which packs wronged wife Wendy Appleyard to the Dark Hostelry in Rosington, where she licks her wounds at the home of her best friend, Janet Byfield, whose husband David, vice principal at the local theological college, is sedately angling to replace the retiring principal. Working part-time at cataloguing the cathedral library, Wendy becomes fascinated with the dark figure dominating the whole trilogy: Rev. Francis Youlgreave, whose death 50 years earlier hasn’t stilled the gossip about his demented poetry, his fondness for mutilating animals, and his scandalous sermon advocating the ordination of women. What became of Simon Martlesham, a boy who ran errands for Youlgreave, and his sister Nancy, who vanished without a trace soon after appearing as an angel (one of several of the creepiest angels imaginable on display here) in a mysterious group photo? Youlgreave’s spirit returns with a vengeance in a modern-day murder that looks backward to his own lifetime and forward to the first two chapters of the trilogy.

Readers who come to this climactic installment from the first two books, as they are strongly advised to do, will be compensated for seeing too easily around the curves by an uncommonly rich tour de force: watching the groundwork for the fatalities of 1970 and 1995 laid with each promise, each revelation, every dish of ice cream.