by Norman Russell

Robert Hale £18.99 (0-7090-7553-7); Church Times Bookshop £17.10

THE YEAR IS 1893, and 22-year-old Caroline Parrish is travelling by train to the cathedral city of Ancaster, to live with her uncle, Canon Walter Parrish, and his wife Millie. On the way she shares a compartment with one Sergeant Bottomley, who looks more like a farmer than a detective; he provides her with his address should she ever need it.

And need it she does, as she becomes involved in the murky secrets of the cathedral close at Ancaster. The Dean, Lawrence Girdlestone, is as upright and unbending as his name suggests. He is also implacably opposed to anything that smacks of idolatry, and this leads him to order the Clerk of the Works, surly Mr Solomon, to remove the four stone figures that adorn the tower of the cathedral. Girdlestone views these as demonic images; to many of the townsfolk, however, they represent Ancaster’s guardian angels, and the Dean’s determination to remove them arouses a collective hatred.

And then the Dean disappears. Has he run away before charges of fraud can be made against him, or has he been murdered? His alcoholic wife Laura seems to be a prime suspect, as does the outwardly genial but inwardly envious and guilt-ridden Prebendary Nicholas Arkwright. He has had terrible dreams of pushing the Dean off the cathedral roof, and, with an unlikely disregard for the consequences, has confessed as much to old Bishop Grandison (the only character in the novel supposedly based on a real person).

But I won’t say whodunnit, for that would spoil the enjoyment of what is, despite occasionally anachronistic language and too many adjectives, a gripping novel. Caroline, the heroine, is a sympathetic character who is drawn to the good in people.

She will no doubt make an exemplary daughter-in-law to Nicholas Arkwright, who by the end of the book is happily freed from his demons and about to be installed as the new Dean of Ancaster.

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