The Prayer Of The Night Shepherd

First rate. A passionate, flawed modern woman, every bit as concerned with the intricacies of crime as with demons that go bump in the night. We don't praise our home-grown thriller writers enough. It's high time we praised Phil Rickman.'

Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

'The dark no man's land where murder mingles with superstition, genetics and the twisted conditioning of unhappy families. Settings and characters are pitch-perfect. Complex, absorbing,

fascinating…'

Andrew Taylor, Sherlock Magazine

'A thinking reader's Elizabeth George.'

Kirkus Reviews

'Rickman writes like one of the mediums he describes - like he's channeling words from a better place. His characters leap off the page and follow you around when you've stopped reading.'

John Whitbourn, SFX

'Scary, spiritual…Merrily Watkins is sucked into the swamp of swirling, inherited evil laced with trickery and confrontation…'

Tony Heath, Tribune

'…risks the wrath of Sherlockians right from the start by suggesting (quite rightly in my view) that The Hound of the Baskervilles is an excellent ghost story that chickens out and becomes a weak

detective story.'

Anthony Brown, Starburst

Yes, The Hound of the Baskervilles remains Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous novel, and real-life mystery surrounds it like glowing phosphorous. The story persists, for instance, that the origins of the Hound lie not on Dartmoor but in the legend of Black Vaughan on the Welsh Border. Merrily Watkins doesn't know much about this, but she'll learn.

Of course, it's Merrily's daughter, Jane, who inadvertently gets her into this. Jane has a weekend job, now, at the Stanner Hall Hotel (right on the Welsh border) where the new owner, former TV producer Ben Foley, is determined to prove that the Victorian Gothic mansion was the original model for Baskerville Hall. Ben also wonders why Conan Doyle, whose obsession with spiritualism came to dominate his life, gave The Hound such a rational, prosaic ending. Members of The White Company, a society named after another of Doyle's novels, think they know exactly what happened to persuade him to cover his tracks and switch the location to Dartmoor. And it involves an exorcism. Jane, naturally, is fascinated, especially when she's asked to help with a TV documentary on the issue. Wisest, however, to say nothing to her mum. Hardback publication of The Prayer of the Night Shepherd led to a revival of the controversy over the origins of The Hound of the Baskervilles, with half a page in The Daily Telegraph, followed by a wad of readers' letters, and a live debate between BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester and BBC Radio Devon. And it's not over yet…