The Unburied

by Charles Palliser

Overview

In Victorian England, Dr. Courtine is invited to spend the days before Christmas with Austin, a friend from his youth, in the Cathedral Close of Thurchester. Courtine hopes to research an unsolved mystery at the cathedral library, but when Austin captivates him with the story of the town ghost — a macabre tale of murder and deception dating back two centuries — Courtine finds himself drawn instead into a haunting world of avarice, skullduggery, and exceptional evil.
Daring, unpredictable, atmospheric, The Unburied is a dazzling entry in the canon of classic Victorian masterpieces of suspense.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743410519
Publisher:	Atria Books
Publication date:	11/01/2000
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Charles Palliser is the author of The Unburied, The Quincunx, and Betrayals. He has taught modern literature and creative writing at universities in Glasgow, London, and the United States. Since 1990 he has been a full-time writer. He lives in London.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Tuesday Evening

* * *

WHILE MY MEMORY IS FRESH I am going to describe exactly what I saw and heard on the occasion, less than a week past, when I encountered a man who was walking about just like you and me—despite the inconvenience of having been brutally done to death.

    My visit began inauspiciously. Because of the weather, which for two days had draped a cloak of freezing fog upon the southern half of the country, the train was delayed and I missed a connection. By the time I reached my destination—two hours late—I had been travelling for several hours through a premature night. As I sat alone in the ill-lit carriage, holding a book in front of me but making little attempt to read, I gazed out at the shrouded landscape that grew increasingly unfamiliar and indistinct as the dusk fell and the fog thickened. Gradually the impression took hold of me that the train was bearing me not forwards but backwards—carrying me out of my own life and time and into the past.

    Suddenly I was recalled to myself when, with an abrupt jerk, the train began to slow down and, after a series of shudders, came to a halt in a darkness that was barely mitigated by the dim lights from the carriages. We were so far behind the timetable that I had no idea if this was my station. As I stood at the door trying to see a signboard in the liverish yellow glow of a distant gas-lamp, I heard a window further along the train being lowered and a fellow-passenger call out to ask if we had reached the terminus. A voice from somewherealong the platform replied in the negative, saying that this was the last stop before the end of the line and naming my destination.

    I took my bag from the rack and descended with only two or three other travellers. They passed from my sight while I stood for a few moments on the platform, shocked by the cold and stamping my feet and clasping my arms about me as I tried to breathe the foul air in which the acrid smell of hard frost was mingled with the smoke of the town's thousands of coal-fires.

    Austin had told me that he would be unable to meet me at the station because his duties would detain him, and that I should therefore go straight to the house. I had preferred that, since it had occurred to me that I might not recognize him and it would be better to encounter him at his own door. I could not decide if the prospect of finding that he had changed was more or less disturbing than discovering that he had not. I believe, however, that what I was really afraid of was not so much the changes I would find in him as seeing in the face of my old friend the transformation which the years had wrought upon myself.

    The train whistled and shunted out of the station leaving me gasping at the soot-laden smoke it had belched forth—a dark, bowels-of-the-earth mineral smell. Darkness fell again and all that was visible now was a flaring gas-jet above what must be the gate from the platform. I directed myself towards it and at the barrier a railway employee, muffled up with a scarf across his face, took my ticket with one of his gloved hands.

    When I passed out to the forecourt I found that my fellow-passengers had vanished like phantoms. There was only one cab waiting and I engaged it. The face that the driver turned to me had a bulbous nose and hanging lower lip which, together with the stench of sour beer on his breath, inspired little confidence. I gave the address and we lurched into motion.

    Although the town was unfamiliar to me I knew that the station was about a mile from the centre. Through the little window of the swaying vehicle I could see almost nothing, though I could hear that there were few other vehicles on the road. In three or four minutes we started going up a slight rise and I guessed that we were ascending the hill at the summit of which the Romans had built their fortress to guard the ancient crossroads.

    On both sides of the road were rows of cottages in several of whose lighted windows I caught sight of families sitting down for their evening meal. Though my welcome so far was cold, I told myself that at least I would not be spending the week in College with the dreary remnant of my unmarried colleagues who had not been invited anywhere.

    The cab slowed as the hill grew steeper and I realized, with surprise, that my heart was beating faster. I had often wondered what sort of a hand my old friend had made of his life. As undergraduates we had talked much of the stir we would make out in the great world—both of us passionate about our studies and ambitious for recognition. Did he regret the way his life had turned out? Was he happy in this remote little town? Had he found other compensations? From time to time I had heard rumours about his way of life from our common acquaintance, though I gave them little credit. I had speculated often about him and when I had received his invitation—so surprising after such a long estrangement—I had not been able to resist.

    The carriage breasted the rise, and as the wheels began to clatter over the cobbles, our speed increased. Now there were street-lamps whose misty haloes cast scant light in the thick fog and I could see that although we appeared to be in the High Street, there was little traffic in the carriageway and few foot-passengers on the pavements. As the hooves of the cab-horse rang out in the silent street, we might have been travelling through a sacked city deserted after a siege. Then, without warning, I was thrown from side to side as the vehicle made a succession of sharp turns and passed through a great arch—the clattering hooves echoing around me. I thought the driver had brought me to an inn by mistake but at that moment I heard—I might almost say I was stunned by—the heavy thud of a great bell. It struck four more times—each chime seeming to overtake the last like ripples spreading outwards through the fog—and I realized that I was right underneath the Cathedral and that in the near-darkness of the fog we had come upon it without my being aware.

    The cab swung round sharply for the last time and drew up. A few yards away was a porch—the south door of the transept. In the flaring light of a gas-mantle I saw a stack of bricks and some wooden slats, covered by a tarred cloth.

    'Are they working on the Cathedral?' I asked the driver as I descended.

    'Aren't they always?' he answered.

     As I was paying the fare the door of the nearest house opened and a figure came hurrying towards me.

    'Old fellow, how glad I am to see you,' said a youthful voice that I remembered so well I shivered. The voice was the same but I saw before me a stranger, a middle-aged man with lined cheeks and a high forehead from which the thin greying hair was receding. Austin seized me and hugged me, and as I felt how slight his frame was, I remembered that un-English impulsiveness and emotionalism of his that I had always envied and been a little afraid of.

    'Thank you for coming,' he said, one hand patting my back as we embraced. 'God bless you. God bless you.'

    At his words I felt a profound regret for what had happened. It could not have been foreseen during the period of our friendship that we would be parted for so long—parted by an estrangement that had come about because he had been implicated in the most painful experience of my life. Afterwards it was I who had written to him in a gesture intended to show that I wanted our friendship to survive. It was only when he had failed to respond that I had begun to wonder if he felt guilt for the part he had played and then to speculate more and more about what role exactly he had been assigned or had taken upon himself. Despite that, I wrote him a short note that first Christmas and every subsequent one, and after a few years he had begun to do the same—more briefly—and had continued to do so about every two or three years.

    I heard news of him through common acquaintances, though less and less often as they lost touch or went abroad or died. And then a month ago—long after I had assumed that the embers of our friendship had turned to ashes—I had received a letter inviting me to visit him—indeed, urging me to do so in the warmest terms—on any date of my own choosing since he never went away, provided only that I had 'the patience to endure the company of the dull and crotchety old fellow I've become'. At first I had wondered if blowing on those embers now would revive or extinguish them, but I had an idea of why he might have decided to invite me and so I had written back to say that I would come with pleasure and that it fortunately happened that I was anxious to survey and measure the ancient earthworks at Woodbury Castle just outside the town. I said that I would come early, in the new year on my way back from my niece and that I would give him as much warning as possible. (In the event, I had altered my plans and had been able to give him only a few days' notice.)

    Behind me I heard the cab turning in the narrow way between the houses and the Cathedral.

    Austin drew back, still holding me by both arms, so that for the first time I could see him, though only in the feeble light cast by the gas-mantle some fifteen yards away. There was the old Austin smiling at me. The same brightness in his large black eyes, the same boyish eagerness. He was smiling and yet, for all his apparent pleasure at seeing me again, I thought there was something evasive, something shadowed in his gaze that did not quite meet mine. Was he thinking what I was thinking: What have the years done to you? What have they given you to match the bright youthfulness they have taken?

    'Dear Austin, you're looking very well.'

    'All the better for seeing you,' he said. 'Come in, my dear old friend.'

    He seized my bag and winced theatrically at its weight. I tried to take it from him but he drew it away too quickly for me so that for a moment we were a couple of playful undergraduates again. 'What on earth is in it? Books, I suppose?'

    'And Christmas gifts for my niece's children. Though one of them is for you.'

    'Oh, capital! I love being given presents,' he exclaimed. He carried the bag ahead of me to the door where he thrust out an arm to invite me to enter before him.

    I peered up at the building. 'What a pretty old house,' I said. In fact, as I spoke the words I perceived that the house was quaint rather than pretty. It was tall and narrow and the casement windows and doors were so manifestly out of alignment with each other and with the ground that, squashed between two bigger houses, it looked like a drunken man being held up under the armpits by his companions.

    'It comes with the post. It's regarded as a benefit, but I often think I should be paid more for living in it. The best houses are in the Lower Close.'

    Meanwhile the cab-driver had effected his awkward manoeuvre and I heard the vehicle roll away. As I passed over the threshold I went down a couple of steps, for the level of the cobbled court outside had risen over the centuries. In the dark little hall I found myself facing a staircase—indeed, the house was all stairs, for it was of an ancient construction with only two rooms on each floor. When I had removed my greatcoat and hat, Austin led me into his front-parlour. I could see that the kitchen was the little room beyond it. The front-parlour—or dining-room as he called it, and it was apparent from the table laid for two that this was where he ate—was cold, though there was a newly-lit fire burning. In the light of the gas-lamp I could see Austin clearly at last. His nose was redder than I remembered it, and though his skin was still as pale as paper, it was now coarse and wrinkled. He was as slender as he had been as a young man. (I cannot say the same in my own case, I fear.) Oddly, he was taller than I remembered. Seeing my scrutiny he smiled and I did the same. Then he turned away and began to tidy up as if he had made no preparations for my arrival.

    All the while he asked me questions about my journey and I responded with enquiries about the house and its position and its amenities. I seated myself in one of the two old chairs at the table. The furniture was shabby and broken down, with a greasy shine upon the fabric. The old panelling was blackened by a couple of centuries of candle-flames and on the bare boards there was only a threadbare Turkey carpet. Absurdly, I felt my heart thumping. The place was so mean, almost squalid. I thought of my own comfortable apartments and the college servants who kept everything clean and neat.

    Austin poured me a glass of madeira-wine from a decanter which stood on a side-table. As he handed it to me, the smell of the place suddenly struck me—thick, heavy, intimate. Holding the glass, I drew breath with difficulty through my nostrils. I shut my eyes and thought of the Cathedral so near, of bones and flesh rotting beneath the stones, of what might be beneath this house which was in the shadow of the great building. The smell was sweet, obscene, like a rotting corpse pressing down upon me, holding me in a clammy, slippery embrace, and suddenly I believed I was going to be violently ill. I managed to sip a little of the wine and somehow to turn my thoughts elsewhere and the moment passed. I looked up and saw that Austin was watching me curiously and I forced a smile and then we toasted each other and my arrival.

    What could we talk about after so long? It seemed absurd to engage in the trivial chatter of mere acquaintances—the weather, the journey, the proximity of the house to the Cathedral and the various amenities and inconveniences thereof. Yet that is what we did. And all the while, I was scrutinizing him and wondering how the passage of time had changed him. And I supposed he was looking at me with the same questions. Could we fall back into the boyish intercourse that we had enjoyed or, much more to be hoped, could we find a new mature note of friendship? Or would we flail uneasily between the old and now inappropriate manner and a new realization that we had little in common?

    'How good it is to see you,' I said when there was a pause.

    He smiled at me and his smile stayed even as he lifted his glass to his mouth and drank.

    I felt I was smiling idiotically back at him. Simply for something to say, I blurted out: 'How long it must be since we last saw each other!' As soon as the words were uttered I wished them recalled. How strange that when one has resolved not to speak of a particular subject it should be the very first thing one brings up.

    As if the remark awakened no memories, he put down his glass and made a show of counting on his fingers. 'Twenty years.'

    'Longer. Twenty-two. Nearly twenty-two.'

    He shook his head with a smile.

    I hadn't intended to raise the subject at all, but now that I had, I wanted us to remember it correctly. Then I would say no more about it. 'You came to the station at Great Yarmouth to see me off. To see us off. I have always remembered my last sight of you on the platform as the train drew out.'

    He gazed at me as if with nothing more than polite curiosity. 'How strange. My recollection is that you and I returned to London alone.'

    'Absolutely not. I can see you standing there and waving goodbye. The date was July the twenty-eighth and it was twenty-two years ago come the summer.'

    'You must be right. You're the one who knows about the past.'

    'It's very hard to know the truth about the past, Austin. But the events of that summer are, I assure you, engraved upon my memory.'

    I had spoken with more emotion than I had intended. As I drank, the glass clattered against my teeth. I was suddenly terrified that he would utter one of the two names that were never to be mentioned between us. I lowered the glass, trying to keep my hand steady.

    'We won't argue about it. It isn't worth it.' Then he smiled and said: 'But now to the future. You can stay until Saturday?'

    'With pleasure. But I will have to leave early in the morning since it is Christmas Eve and I am expected at my niece's in the afternoon.'

    'And that is where?'

    'Exeter, as I mentioned in my letter.'

    'Yes, of course. Well, that is agreed. We will meet in the evenings, but I'm afraid I shall be working during the day.'

    'And I have things to do myself that will keep me occupied most of the day.'

    'So you wrote. I hope this wretched cold and fog won't hamper your work too much.'

    I smiled. It was an odd thing to say, but Austin had always had an elfin sense of humour. I had written to him only a few days earlier to ask if it would be convenient if I were to alter our arrangement and come at such short notice and he had replied that he would be delighted. What had prompted me to bring forward the visit was this. When I had received the invitation from Austin, I had remembered that my College Library had the uncatalogued papers of an antiquarian called Pepperdine who, I recalled, had visited the town shortly after the Restoration, and so I had decided to look at them. While doing so, I had come across a letter which—as I had explained to Austin—suggested that a long-standing scholarly controversy relating to my beloved Alfredian period might be resolved by the discovery of a certain document in the Library of the Dean and Chapter. I was so anxious to begin my researches that I had changed my plans and decided to visit Austin on my way to Exeter rather than on the journey back in the new year.

    'After your long journey,' he went on, 'I thought you'd like to stay in tonight, and I'll cook our supper.'

    'As you did in the old days,' I exclaimed. 'Do you not recall? When we lodged in Sidney Street, we used to take turns to grill chops?'

    Memories flooded back and I found myself quite misty-eyed.

    Austin nodded.

    'Do you remember your "chops St Lawrence" as you called them? Burnt to a crisp like the poor saint? You called your dinners an auto-da-fé for you said more faith was required to eat them than the wretched victims of the Inquisition ever needed.'

    He smiled but it seemed to be at my own nostalgia rather than at the memories I was evoking. 'I have lamb-cutlets and capers ready. I have had enough practice in the intervening years to be able to promise no acts of martyrdom in the eating of them.'

    It was odd to think of Austin keeping house for himself. I remembered how slovenly he had been—crumbs always scattered on the floor of his rooms in college, his clothes thrown over a chair, cups and plates rarely washed. The room I was in now was not very much tidier than that.

    'I will show you your room,' Austin said. 'I expect you will want to wash while I am cooking.'

    'Do I have time to look at the Cathedral? I need to stretch my legs after a long day on the train.'

    'Supper will not be ready for about half an hour.'

    'Won't the Cathedral be locked by now?"

(Continues...)

Table of Contents

	Editor's Foreword	1
	The Courtine Account	11
	The Enchanted Princess	355
	Editor's Afterword	364
	List of Characters	401

Editorial Reviews

The Washington Post Book World Probably generates as much plot per page as is humanly possible to.

Entertainment Weekly As the layers of dirty deeds are unearthed, [the novel] feels like an archaeological dig — mesmerizing, meticulous.

The Wall Street Journal The Christmas ghost was a staple of Victorian holiday fiction, and The Unburied is an elegant update of the tradition that is both modern in its concerns and wholly convincing as an artifact of another age.

The New York Observer Enormously enjoyable.

The New Yorker All the murders are puzzles, and Palliser constructs his plot like a maze and lures readers into it. The books ruthless consistency of style and the somewhat bleak view of humankind set it apart from the usual thriller.

Palo Alto Daily News There is little doubt that The Unburied confirms to all, British or American, that Palliser is one of the world's most imaginative historical novelists.

The Washington Post Book World A fine literary diversion for a winter's night or two....The novel's prose moves swiftly but pauses from time to time for lengthy — and interesting — conversations about the nature of religious belief, historical investigation, and marital passion. Palliser even inserts sentences that call to mind tags from nineteenth-century authors like Nietzsche and Thoreau ('When you come to die you'll realize that you have not lived').

The Wall Street Journal No one is exactly as he seems to be.

The Guardian (London) Charles Palliser now bids to be our leading contemporary Victorian novelist.

Publishers Weekly (starred review) A complex chronicle of evil, immorality, and greed....Both a gifted raconteur and a shrewd observer of human nature, Palliser should win new readers on this side of the Atlantic with this compulsively readable tale.

From the Publisher

Our Review
A Historical Murder Mystery of the Highest Order
In 1990, Charles Palliser made a spectacular debut with The Quincunx, a huge, densely plotted book that illuminates, in extraordinary detail, virtually every level of English society in the early 19th century. In his fourth novel, The Unburied, Palliser turns to the late Victorian era to give us an equally authoritative reconstruction of the past and a tightly compressed narrative filled with treachery, drama, and interconnected mysteries.

The novel opens with a brief preface in which Philip Barthram, editor of the manuscript we're about to read, travels to Geneva for an enigmatic encounter with an old, dying woman. At the end of this encounter -- which makes numerous references to events and people we know nothing about -- the narrative shifts abruptly, taking us into "The Courtine Account," a memoir written by Cambridge historian Edward Courtine. The memoir recounts Courtine's 1881 visit to the cathedral town of Thurchester, site of the mysteries that will gradually dominate the novel.

Ostensibly, Courtine has come to Thurchester to visit his former college roommate, Austin Fickling. Courtine and Austin parted bitterly 20 years before and hope to effect a belated reconciliation. Courtine also hopes to unearth a manuscript -- rumored to reside in the Thurchester library -- that will shed new light on his academic specialty, the reign of King Alfred, medieval ruler of Wessex. As he attempts to follow both his personal and professional agendas, Edward finds himself embroiled in a pair of unresolved mysteries. One concerns the 200-year-old murders of William Burgoyne and Launcelot Freeth, whose violent deaths continue to generate controversy and speculation. The other concerns the brutal killing of a local banker, a killing that takes place -- or appears to take place -- just minutes after Courtine and Austin have visited the banker's home.

As the novel progresses, the details of the two crimes echo each other with an eerie frequency. With unobtrusive skill, Palliser leads us through a cumulatively fascinating labyrinth composed of fact, rumor, legend, and supposition. Within this labyrinth, objective "truth" proves to be an illusive, perhaps unattainable goal. But Courtine, a historian who believes in the power of the imagination, continues to pursue that goal. In the course of his pursuit, which is never wholly successful, he finds himself forced to reassess the central elements of his life: his embattled relationship with Austin Fickling, the painful failure of his marriage, two decades before, and the unperceived weaknesses of his own character.

Admirers of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, John Fowles, and Umberto Eco should take this novel to their hearts. The Unburied is exciting, audacious, mysterious, moving, and intellectually challenging, all at once. Like The Quincunx, it speaks clearly and directly to the modern sensibility and leaves a lingering aftertaste behind.

--Bill Sheehan

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has recently been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).

bn.com

By now the stakes for murder mysteries have risen almost impossibly high. At the end of the century of the banality of evil, it takes more than a murder to make us shiver: It takes orgies, bloodbaths, refinements of sadism of the sort that Thomas Harris supplies. The quality that made Wilkie Collins' suspense novels so absorbing -- the claustrophobic feeling that a single crime poisons the universe -- is virtually impossible to achieve in an era in which we know from the newspaper that worse things happen in our own city a dozen times a day. And so it makes sense that Charles Palliser has set his new murder mystery, The Unburied, in the late 19th century. That's the only way he could regain some of Collins' Gothic power.

Palliser is unashamedly Victorian (his very name is out of Trollope) in hauling in haunted churches, menacing fogs, gas-lit streets, ancient ghosts. But he is also contemporary: His hero triumphs not just by solving the murder but also by resolving his own psychological problems. Edward Courtine, whose "found" manuscript makes up the bulk of the novel, is a middle-aged university historian specializing in Alfred the Great. He is also a husband emotionally ruined, even 20 years on, by his wife's having abandoned him for another man.

As the novel begins, Courtine is coming to the cathedral town of Thurchester to see Austin Fickling, an old friend who played a part in the jilting, hoping to rebuild their friendship. But as one might expect of a man who lives in a rickety house in the shadow of an ancient cathedral, Fickling is acting odd: toting strange parcels, screaming in his sleep, slipping out in the dead of night. To say that a murder ensues isn't giving anything away; in a town like Thurchester, it's practically de rigueur.

Indeed, the town has seen this kind of thing before. In the most innovative feature of The Unburied, Courtine's historical inquiries lead him to three earlier murders, which Palliser weaves into the main story: one involving King Alfred, one from the English Civil War period and a third -- the most important for the plot -- from the early 17th century, involving two deaths in the cathedral. The parallel between the historian's work and the detective's is clear as Courtine tries to solve the 17th century and 19th century crimes simultaneously, while the reader has to keep an abundance of names, clues and motives straight.

It's this plurality of crimes that keeps The Unburied from being a perfect suspense novel -- that, and the somewhat watery psychologizing that creeps in toward the end. Reading Courtine's "manuscript," we are naturally the most curious about the murder he himself is drawn into. But it doesn't transpire until two-thirds of the way through, and we don't find out the solution until the "editor's" postscript at the very end.

Instead we get a great deal of trumped-up medieval and 17th century history and philology, which simply aren't as satisfying. Every suspense novel shares the problem that the solution, when it's revealed, is almost inevitably unconvincing; hardly any crime can be wicked enough to justify the creepy atmosphere that the writer has built up around it. But Palliser's solution is even more unsatisfying than usual: It requires the intervention of several previously unknown characters and seems stuffed in almost as an afterthought.

Moreover, when the focus shifts to Courtine's own marital and emotional problems, we are transported to a psychologist's couch in 1999 and lose the Victorian flavor entirely. One character instructs Courtine that "it's only when the burial is over that the process of grieving can begin." Thus the multiple meanings of the title: The unburied is both the murdered man whose ghost cries out for justice and the traumatized man who needs to lay his "issues" to rest. But since Courtine -- appropriately for the narrator of a thriller -- is not a fully developed character (he is really an observer, a surrogate for the reader), it's hard to care much about his emotional needs. By asking us to care nevertheless, Palliser clouds the novel and distracts us from the (entertaining and absorbing) main business: the murder and its solution. Which is another way of saying that the old 19th century formula has life in it yet.
— Salon

Adam Kirsch

Palliser knows what he is doing, and he does it with grace, involving us in one of the most complex and multilayered plots we have ever been mystified by.
— New York Times Book Review

James R. Kincaid

A complex chronicle of evil, immorality and greed, British writer Palliser's engrossing new gothic thriller adroitly keeps three plot lines spinning and three mysteries unwinding while maintaining an atmosphere of sophisticated intrigue and dark suspense. The narrator of the main story, set in the late Victorian era, is Dr. Edward Courtine, an Oxford historian nearing 50, who leads a lonely life focused mainly on his research about a strange incident in the life of ninth-century monarch King Alfred the Great. Since an important 11th-century document relating to that event may be hidden in the library of the Thurchester Cathedral, Courtine is glad to accept an invitation from an old friend from his Cambridge college days, Austin Fickling, from whom he has been estranged for 20 years, to visit him in that remote little town. Veiled allusions from Courtine about the part that Fickling played in the breakup of Courtine's brief marriage constitute another layer of secrets. The Thurchester Cathedral also played a crucial role in the 17th-century murder of powerful, aristocratic Canon Treasurer William Burgoyne, and the disappearance of the cathedral's chief mason--and the discovery of a body in a supposedly empty crypt during Courtine's Christmas-time visit only complicates the mystery. Framing these stories is the dramatic, teasingly oblique confrontation by the fictional editor of Courtine's posthumous papers with a woman who seems to hold the keys to another murder, a grisly affair that occurs during Courtine's stay in Thurchester. Each of these intersecting plots holds evidence of venal conduct, unscrupulous motives, religious factionalism, scholarly infighting and sexual secrets. With the minute calibrations and subtle slight-of-hand of a safe-cracker, Palliser (The Quincunx) advances his intricate, page-turning narrative with intriguing revelations, while depicting Courtine's gradual enlightenment about the moral decisions that lie in his path. Both a gifted raconteur and a shrewd observer of human nature, Palliser should win new readers on this side of the Atlantic with this compulsively readable tale. (Nov.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Palliser has created another tour de force of intricate plotting and darkly Victorian atmosphere. As with the best-selling The Quincunx, the reader is compulsively absorbed by tantalizing partial truths and vague foreshadowings, though coincidence plays a less intrusive role here. On a visit to an old school friend in Thurchester, England, professional historian Courtine looks forward to doing research in the cathedral library and renewing ties; he does not expect to become embroiled in a controversy surrounding a centuries-old mystery, nor does he anticipate being a major witness to a gruesome murder. Palliser brilliantly portrays the vicious rivalries particular to self-contained religious and educational institutions--rivalries that have been repeating themselves for 250 years since the horrific death of Canon Treasurer William Burgoyne and the mysterious disappearance of the Cathedral Mason Gambrill. This riveting story is as much psychological thriller as it is mystery. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/99.]--Cynthia Johnson, Cary Memorial Lib., Lexington, MA Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

All the murders are puzzles, and Palliser constructs his plot like a maze and lures his readers into it. The book's ruthless consistency of style and the somewhat bleak view of humankind set it apart from the usual thriller.

The New Yorker

...a riveting read beside a blazing hearth on a dark winter night.

Publishing News

Palliser's penchant for riddles wrapped in enigmas (Betrayals, 1995, etc.) continues with a busy tale, set in a cathedral in the south of England, about an old recluse murdered for his money, and an old friendship that has seen better days. Unassuming scholar Ned Cortine, a historian at Oxford, has come to spend a few days before Christmas, 1882, in the ancient town of Thurcester, ostensibly to visit a friend from his youth, Austin, whom he hasn't seen in more than 20 years. More importantly, however, Ned hopes to locate a manuscript in the cathedral library that would refute a rival historian on an obscure point in Anglo-Saxon history. But a hostile greeting and strange behavior from Austin, coupled with Ned's introduction to a curious murder in the cathedral several centuries earlier, cast shadows on his research, and he finds himself caught up in present-day intrigues as well as ancient. Just as he uncovers the 11th-century prize he seeks, he's jolted from the past by being identified, along with Austin, as the last to have seen old Mr. Stonex, Thurcester's reclusive banker, alive before his brutal murder. Then, as if that weren't enough, a body is found in a wall of the cathedral, the remains of the man believed to have been murdered those several centuries before. Ned succeeds in unraveling the old mystery but, in an inquest, fails to persuade anyone with his theory about who killed Stonex, leaving the wrong man to be charged. His failure, accompanied by an assault on his integrity as a historian and the belief that Austin was involved in the murder, prompts him to leave town sadder but much wiser, content to record his experiences privately for posterity. A complexpuzzler, though the real story here, which is finely done even in its anachronistic 19th-century style, is the simple one of a decent man forced at last to open his eyes and take a good look around.

Kirkus Reviews