Paperback
The Roth Trilogy - The Office of the Dead (The Roth Trilogy, Book 3)
By Andrew Taylor
Final novel in Andrew Taylor’s powerful Roth Trilogy: ‘With all due deference to its heavenly virtues, this is a hellishly good novel’ – Frances Fyfield, Sunday Express
Janet Byfield has everything Wendy Appleyard lacks: she’s beautiful; she has a handsome husband, a clergyman on the verge of promotion; and most of all she has an adorable little daughter, Rosie. So when Wendy’s life falls apart, it’s to her oldest friend, Janet, that she turns.
At first it seems as to Wendy as though nothing can touch the Byfields’ perfect existence in 1950s Cathedral Close, Rosington, but old sins gradually come back to haunt the present, and new sins are bred in their place. The shadow of death seeps through the Close, and only Wendy, the outsider looking in, is able to glimpse the truth. But can she grasp it’s twisted logic in time to prevent a tragedy whose roots lie buried deep in the past?
‘Masterly… will have the reader turning back to check the identities of Taylor’s ambiguous characters and relish his fine writing’Gerald Kaufman, Scotsman -
‘It is in the domestic sphere that Taylor triumphs… A highly sinister piece of work Natasha Cooper, TLS -
‘The writing is consistenly good’Sunday Times -
‘The intellect and the imagination are seized… Andrew Taylor has brought a major literary undertaking to a deeply satisfying conclusion’James Melville, Ham & High -