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

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Andrew Taylor is the author of a number of crime novels, including the ground-breaking Roth Trilogy, which was adapted into the acclaimed drama Fallen Angel, and the historical crime novels The Ashes of London, The Silent Boy, and The American Boy, a No.1 Sunday Times bestseller and a 2005 Richard & Judy Book Club Choice.

He has won many awards, including the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award (the only author to win it three times) and the CWA’s prestigious Diamond Dagger.

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The second novel in the Roth 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.

Tense, brooding and atmospheric, 'The Judgement of Strangers 'is a hugely complex and intelligent novel from the award-winning Andrew Taylor.

The first book in the Roth Trilogy, 'The Four Last Things,' is now out in paperback.

"This author knows precisely how to wield suspense"
INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

"A major thriller talent"
TIME OUT

"A finely crafted story of suspense…Taylor has established a sound reputation for writing tense clammy novels that perceptively penetrate the human psyche. In 'The Four Last Things,' he goes deeper still. His ingredients are doubt, guilt and moral ambiguity, intermingling with the more usual trappings of crime detection. It is a book which can be read at more than one lever. The appetite for the remaining two of the trilogy is firmly whetted"
MARCEL BERLINS, 'The Times'

"A surefire thriller to take your mind off those winter blues"
NEW WOMAN

"Andrew Taylor is a master of the corrosive passions that fester beneath conventional facades, and this novel showcases his sensitive exploration of human emotions…A tense and shocking psychological thriller"
VAL MCDERMID, 'Manchester Evening News'

"Every parent's nightmare"
FAMILY CIRCLE

"Andrew Taylor digs deep to explore the roots of sex, violence and religion. This is a fine thriller, with clues complex enough to tax a Morse"
REGINALD HILL