Phil Rickman, journaliste primé, a lancé la captivante série Merrily Watkins après cinq romans acclamés. Son écriture explore en profondeur la psychologie des personnages, créant des atmosphères évocatrices souvent situées à la frontière galloise. Rickman mêle avec brio suspense, éléments surnaturels et folklore, offrant une expérience littéraire distinctive. Ses romans sont reconnus pour leur complexité et leur approche originale du genre.
The latest eerie supernatural thriller featuring the unforgettable Merrily Watkins - parish priest, single mother and exorcist. Perfect for fans of John Connolly, Ruth Rendell and Midsomer Murders.
When autumn storms blast Hereford, centuries-old human bones are found among the roots of a tree blown down on the city's Castle Green. But why have they been stolen? At the nearby Cathedral, another storm is building around a modernizing bishop who believes that if the Church is to survive it must phase out irrelevant archaic practices. Not good news for Merrily Watkins, consultant on the paranormal or, as it used to be known, diocesan exorcist. Especially as she's now presented with the job at its most medieval. In the moody countryside on the edge of Wales, a rambling 12th-century house is thought to be haunted. Although its new owners don't believe in ghosts, they do believe in spiritual darkness and the need for an exorcism. But their approach to Merrily is oblique and guarded. No one can be told—least of all, the new bishop. Merrily's discovery of the house's links with the medieval legend of a man who resisted mortality threatens to expose the hidden history of a more modern cult and its trail of insidious abuse—a trail that may not be closed.
A standalone supernatural thriller from the author of the chilling Merrily Watkins Mysteries. Every night for 400 years, a curfew bell has tolled from the church tower of Crybbe. Superstitious ritual, or sole defence against an ancient evil?
When a man's body is discovered below a waterfall in the picturesque town of Hay-on-Wye, his death appears to be "unnatural" in every sense and Merrily Watkins, parish priest, single mother, and exorcist, is drafted in to investigate.
Tudor intrigue, murder, and the dark arts--the second in a stunning and acclaimed historical series starring Dr. John Dee, perfect for fans of C. J. Sansom All talk is of the End-time, and the dead are rising. At the end of the sunless summer of 1560, black rumor shrouds the death of the one woman who stands between Lord Robert Dudley and marriage to the young Queen Elizabeth. Did Dudley's wife, Amy, die from an accidental fall in a deserted house, or was it murder? Even Dr. John Dee, astrologer royal, adviser on the Hidden, and one of Dudley's oldest friends, is uncertain. Then a rash promise to the Queen sends him to his family's old home on the Welsh Border in pursuit of the Wigmore Shewstone, a crystal credited with supernatural properties. With Dee goes Robert Dudley, considered the most hated man in England. They travel with a London judge sent to try a sinister Welsh brigand with a legacy dating back to the Battle of Brynglas. After the battle, many of the English bodies were, according to legend, obscenely mutilated. Now, on the same haunted hill, another dead man has been found, similarly slashed. Devious politics, small-town corruption, twisted religion, and a brooding superstition leave John Dee isolated in the land of his father.
The sixth instalment in the Merrily Watkins series: Hereford's Diocesan Exorcist must encounter a legacy of evil within the crumbling walls of an old hotel along with memories of murder...
The fifth instalment in the Merrily Watkins series: Merrily must unearth the mysteries of the decaying village of Underhowle, and tackle a particularly stubborn Detective Inspector who strays off course...
The seventh instalment in the Merrily Watkins series: The Parish Priest must solve the mystery of a young boy's deathly fall from the Ludlow Castle ruins, and discovers a hidden obsession with the afterlife amongst the ancient streets...
The compelling first instalment of The John Dee Papers. Religious strife, Glastonbury legends, the bones of King Arthur and the curse of the Tudors... can astrologer John Dee help the young Queen Elizabeth to avoid it?
Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here.The post of Diocesan Exorcist in the Church of England has changed to the preferred term Deliverance Consultant. It sounds less sinister, more caring, so why not a job for a woman? When offered the post the Rev. Merrily Watkins cannot easily refuse, having suffered uncanny experiences of her own.
With the flood water washing up Church Lane towards the vicarage and the shop running out of cigarettes it looks like a cold and complex Christmas for Merrily Watkins in an ancient community forced to untangle its own history against the swirling uncertainty of the future.
In high summer, darkness descends on Elgar's England. Investigating a series of road accidents in the Malvern Hills, Merrily Watkins stumbles into a barbed tangle of alienation, murder... and a mystical obsession with the landscape.
NOW A MAJOR ITV DRAMA The Master House, close to the Welsh border, is medieval and slowly falling into ruins. Now the house and its surrounding land have been sold to the Duchy of Cornwall. But the Duchy's plans to renovate the house and its outbuildings are frustrated when the specialist builder refuses to work there. 'This is a place,' he tells the Prince's land-steward, 'that doesn't want to be restored.' Directed by the Bishop of Hereford to investigate, deliverance consultant Merrily Watkins discovers ancient connections between the house and the nearby church, built by the Knights Templar whose shadow still envelopes isolated Garway Hill and its scattered communities. Why did all the local inns have astrological names? What deep history lies behind the vicious feud between two local families? And what happened here to intimidate even the great Edwardian ghost-story writer M R James? When Merrily learns that she - and even her daughter, Jane - are under surveillance by the security services, she's ready to quit. But a sudden death changes everything, and she returns to Garway to uncover fibres of fear and hatred stitched into history and now insidiously twisted in the corridors - and the cloisters - of power.
Though dead for two millennia, he remains perfectly preserved in black peat. The Man in the Moss is one of the most fascinating finds of the century. But, for the isolated Pennine community of Bridelow, his removal is a sinister sign. A danger to the ancient spiritual tradition maintained, curiously, by the Mothers' Union. In the weeks approaching Samhain - the Celtic feast of the dead - tragedy strikes again in Bridelow. Scottish folk singer Moira Cairns and American film producer Mungo Macbeth discover their Celtic roots are deeper and darker than they imagined. And, as fundamentalist zealots of both Christian and satanic persuasions challenge an older, gentler faith, the village faces a natural disaster unknown since the reign of Henry VIII.
The fourth instalment in the Merrily Watkins series: A school girl possessed by evil spirits and a savage murder; Merrily is once again drawn into the deadly tangle of deceit and mystery in rural Herefordshire...
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When a derelict country church is bought by a pagan couple, the local evangelical minister reacts with fury. A modern witch hunt begins, and Merrily Watkins is expected to keep a lid on the cauldron. Meanwhile, there is the problem of the man who won’t be parted from his dead wife, the ancient mystery of the five local churches dedicated to St. Michael, and a killer with an old tradition to guard.
The Revd Merrily Watkins had never wanted a picture-postcard parish - or a huge and haunted vicarage. Nor had she particularly wanted to walk straight into a local dispute over a controversial play about a strange seventeeth-century clergyman accused of witchcraft ... a story that certain old-established families would rather remained obscure. But this is Ledwardine, steeped in cider and secrets. A paradise of cobbled streets and timber-framed houses. And also - as Merrily and her teenage daughter Jane discover - a village where horrific murder is a tradition that spans centuries.
Glastonbury, legendary resting place of the Holy Grail, is a mysterious and haunting town. When Diane Ffitch returns home, it's with a sense of deep unease. As the town becomes increasingly split by violence and death, Diane and her friends face up to the worst of all possibilities: the existence of an anti-Grail the Dark Chalice.
In the twelfth-century ruins of the Abbey, it is said every stone was cemented in blood. On December 8, 1980, that blood will run again...In the ruins of a haunted medieval abbey, four musicians hope to tap into the site's dark history. The experience almost destroys them. Years later, the original group is forced to return to the abbey, to confront the old evil they discovered.Thirteen years ago on a cold December night, a rock band called The Philosophers Stone gathered in the ancient ruins of an abbey to record their new album.The evening ended in bloodshed and death. Now, the tapes from that fateful recording session have been released as The Black Album, and the scattered members of the band know it's time for a reunion. Time to return to that dark December night—for one final performance.
Giles Freeman is delighted when his wife Claire inherits an old cottage in a remote village in Wales. Y Groves is small, friendly and very alluring - the perfect escape from London. But American reporter Berry Morelli tries to talk Giles out of moving, believing something is very wrong.
