The Wine Of Angels

It was Lucy Fishwife who pointed me in the direction of Phil Rickman, an author I had no previous knowledge of, but that Lucy thought I might enjoy as I'm such a big Stephen King fan. Rickman does have a similar knack for creating a large community of fully rounded characters, though from reading The Wine Of Angels I'd place him more in the Alan Garner category than anywhere near Maine's Master of Horror. Spooky Middle England mysteries seem to be his bag, and it's appropriate that one of the characters in this novel is a failed musician obsessed with Nick Drake as there's much of Drake's doomed pastoral romanticism to Rickman's writing too.

The Wine Of Angels turns out to be the first of what have since been dubbed The Merrily Watkins Mysteries, introducing said protagonist, an attractive 30-something vicar, widow, and mother of precocious teenager Jane. The novel follows her arrival in the peaceful village of Ledwardine where centuries old tensions are coming to the boil regarding the death of one of her predecessors, a clergyman accused with witchcraft. But supernatural shenanighans may not be the most frightening secret of Ledwardine life, and the living can often be much scarier than the dead, as Merrily and Jane find out to their cost.

I was definitely encouraged to try more from Rickman (no relation to Alan, it seems), and with ten MW Mysteries on the shelf, plus assorted unrelated titles, there definitely seem to be a lot to go at. I'm particularly interested in December, the story of a band psychically scarred by the death of John Lennon. It's on my list.