The body was found in the village school. The vicar of Rooksby-le-Soken in East Anglia was found on Monday morning on a classroom floor with a hole through his heart--but no trace of the bullet. Indubitably he had been killed on the spot, the blood on the wall behind him was proof of that. Detective Chief Inspector George Masters was sent by the Yard to sort things out and decided the method was less important than the motive. From his headquarters in the local pub Masters began his delving into the private lives of the villagers and soon discovered that the vicar was a much unloved incumbent. No one had a good word for him and quite a number had considerably less than that. The publican and his Italian wife, with an attractive, still unwed daughter of twenty-eight, the local G.P. and his obstreperous son who ran a joint practice, the village carpenter, and the schoolmaster with a grudge, were only a few of the suspects Masters unearthed in twenty-four hours. In a few days he had raked up enough dirt to put a lot of them on the spot. But in the end it was his capacity for remembering significant details and fitting them into the jigsaw that sorted out the man and the method. Praise for Douglas Clark "The many who miss the properly clued inductive detective story will fall on this one with relief" - Times Literary Supplement "A good, satisfying, competent whodunit, intelligently thought out and believable without unnecessary fireworks of sex or violence. And the answer, when it comes, is much more convincing than the majority of those in thriller dénouements" - ANTHONY PRICE, Oxford Mail Douglas Clark was born in Lincolnshire, 1919. He wrote over 20 crime novels and under other names, including James Ditton and Peter Hosier.

'I've been waiting for a novel with vicars, rude old ladies, murder and sausage dogs ... et voila!' DAWN FRENCHCanon Daniel Clement is Rector of Champton. He has been there for eight years, living at the Rectory alongside his widowed mother - opinionated, fearless, ever-so-slightly annoying Audrey - and his two dachshunds, Cosmo and Hilda.When Daniel announces a plan to install a lavatory in church, the parish is suddenly (and unexpectedly) divided: as lines are drawn in the community, long-buried secrets come dangerously close to destroying the apparent calm of Champton. And then Anthony Bowness - cousin to Bernard de Floures, patron of Champton - is found dead at the back of the church, stabbed in the neck with a pair of secateurs.As the police moves in and the bodies start piling up, Daniel Clement is the only one who can try and keep his fractured community together... and catch a killer.

To read Gail Godwin is to touch the very core of human experience. With inimitable grace and aching emotional precision, Godwin probes our own complexities in characters whose lives oscillate between success and struggle, stoic resolve and quixotic temptation, bitter disappointment and small, sacred joys. Now with Evensong, she again translates our everyday existence into soul-touching truths as she brings to brilliantly realized life the people of a small Smoky Mountain town--and a woman whose world is indelibly altered by them.

Parish churches have been at the heart of communities for more than a thousand years. But now, fewer than two in one hundred people regularly attend services in an Anglican church, and many have never been inside one. Since the idea of 'church' is its people, the buildings are becoming husks - staples of our landscapes, but without meaning or purpose. Some churches are finding vigorous community roles with which to carry on, but the institutional decline is widely seen as terminal. Yet for Richard Morris, post-war parsonages were the happy backdrop of his childhood. In Evensong he searches for what it was that drew his father and hundreds like him towards ordination as they came home from war in 1945. Along the way we meet all kinds of people - archbishops, chaplains, campaigners, bell-ringers, bureaucrats, archaeologists, gravediggers, architects, scroungers - and follow some of them to dark places. Part personal odyssey, part lyrical history, Evensong asks what churches stand for and what they can tell us; it explores why Anglicanism has often been fractious, and why it has become so diffuse. Spanning over two thousand years, it draws on new discoveries, reflects on the current state of the Church in England and ends amid the messy legacies of colonialism and empire.

Now a major Channel 5 series 'The Queen of Crime.' New York Times When the body of a theology student is found on a desolate stretch of coast in East Anglia, his wealthy father demands that Scotland Yard should re-examine the verdict of accidental death. Commander Adam Dalgliesh agrees to pay a visit to the young man's theological college, St Anselm's, a place he knew as a boy, expecting no more than a nostalgic return to old haunts and a straightforward examination of the evidence. Instead he finds himself embroiled in intrigue, secrets and mystery as the college is torn apart by a sacrilegious and horrifying murder . . . 'Thoroughly gripping.' Guardian 'Pure pleasure.' Spectator

On a desolate stretch of the East Anglian coast, high atop a sweep of cliffs, sits the theological college of St. Anselm's. Down below, smothered by a fall of sand, lies the body of a young ordinand, the son of a powerful business mogul who wants Scotland Yard to investigate his death. Dalgliesh, doubting there is much to uncover in the case, agrees to go, motivated only by a desire to revisit a place where he spent several happy summers in his boyhood. Yet no sooner does he arrive than the college is torn apart by a sacrilegious murder and Dalgliesh finds himself embroiled in one of the most puzzling and horrific cases of his career: no one is above suspicion, and suspects abound. Death in Holy Orders grips and moves us from beginning to end, blessed with extraordinary psychological and emotional richness. The memorable characters and the wonderfully evoked wild coastal setting and religious world in which the action takes place demonstrate yet again why P.D. James ranks as one of the great novelists of our time.

A penetrating and powerful novel about the deep undercurrents of love and regret in one Midwestern family. In 1939, Maggie Doud married Garfield Maguire. Now, fifty years on, she’s Margaret Maguire: a widow and a grandmother, unable to ignore the consequences of having married a cruel and arrogant man. Her daughters are strangers to each other, past hope of reconciling. Margaret’s granddaughter could be the one to break the cycle, but she can’t do it alone. Beautifully rendered and poignantly told, Evensong masterfully explores a woman’s desire for redemption and understanding at the end of her days.

The 1928 Book of Common Prayer is a treasured resource for traditional Anglicans and others who appreciate the majesty of King James-style language. This classic edition features a Presentation section containing certificates for the rites of Baptism, Confirmation, and Marriage. The elegant burgundy hardcover binding is embossed with a simple gold cross, making it an ideal choice for both personal study and gift-giving. The 1928 Book of Common Prayer combines Oxford's reputation for quality construction and scholarship with a modest price - a beautiful prayer book and an excellent value.

Two men lie dead in the vestry of a London church, their throats cut with brutal precision. One is Sir Paul Berowne, rich, cultivated and elegant; the other is an alcoholic vagrant. Challenged with the investigation of a crime that appears to have endless motives, Adam Dalgliesh explores the sinister web spun around a half-burnt diary and a violet-eyed widow who is pregnant and full of malice—all the while hoping to fill the gap of logic that joined these two disparate men in death...