The Lamp of the Wicked

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

"A monumentally ambitious fourth outing."

UK Kirkus review

The Rev Merrily Watkins returns for her fourth supernatural adventure in a series that makes ghostbusting seem even spookier than we could have imagined. This time the engaging cleric-cum-exorcist finds herself involved in sinister happenings around the village of Underhowle, a drab place on the old Roman road between Gloucester and Monmouth. The story and its telling are quintessentially English, though this is the England of wide boys and oddballs rather than of Agatha Christie. Underhowle is the home of a man identified as a serial killer, but Merrily isn't sure that things are quite as straightforward as the police believe. As a hunt for the bodies of young women goes on, Merrily has a suspicion of her own - that the leading detective is blinding himself with ambition. Other worries confront the cleric and her boyfriend. For instance there are the candles and incense left burning in her church, a number of angelic visions that not everyone believes in, and a series of anonymous phone calls that don't say enough. The book opens in an obscure way that some will find offputting. There is too much introspection, not enough action. But after the first few pages Rickman gets going and plunges us into a psychological thriller with a brooding atmosphere of the paranormal. Merrily Watkins finally comes to the truth in the most unexpected of ways. Rickman has written ten novels, all of them ingeniously plotted as this one is. A reservation concerns the amount of slang and dialect in the characters' speech. While it may be true to life, it can make life more difficult than necessary for the reader and distracts from what is otherwise an excellent story. (Kirkus UK)