The smile of a ghost

The border town of Ludlow has it all: exquisite medieval streets, an imposing ruined castle, a parish church the size of a cathedral and a weight of history and legend. Wealthy people, famous people, have come to Ludlow to live. A sad teenage boy comes here to die — dramatically, at sunset, in a fall from the ruins. Accident or suicide? Either way, no great mystery. Or is there?

Robbie Walsh was the nephew of former Detective Sergeant Andy Mumford, newly — and reluctantly — retired from West Mercia CID. When Mumford's ailing mother becomes convinced she's still seeing her dead grandson in the old town, the ex-policeman brings in Merrily Watkins, parish priest, single mum and Deliverance consultant to the diocese of Hereford. Is his mother's problem dementia, delusion or something even more disturbing?

It's already a difficult time for Merrily, now having to work with a new diocesan Deliverance advisory panel headed by an ambitious priest and a sceptical a psychiatrist. When, after two more deaths, she is drawn towards the peculiar lifestyle of the onetime Gothic rock singer Belladonna, Merrily is compelled, for the first time, to work undercover ... discovering that below the surrounding beauty lie layers of alienation and despair, while the shadowy medieval streets nurture a noxious obsession with the nature of death and the afterlife.

Both scepticism and the dark underside of belief threaten Phil Rickman's engagingly open-minded heroine in the seventh in this hauntingly unique mystery series.