Father Anselm Novels

A man arrives at Larkwood Monastery claiming sanctuary. Edward Schwermann is accused of Nazi war crimes: the chances are he's stained with blood, but politics demand that Larkwood shelter him. And Schwermann has intimated that the Church offered him sanctuary once before, during the war. It is this potentially embarrassing claim which brings Father Anselm onto centre stage.

In his first novel, The Sixth Lamentation, William Brodrick introduced Father Anslem, the barrister turned monk who found himself plunged into the tangled history of occupied Paris. Now, in The Gardens of the Dead, Father Anslem is brought back to his own past at the Bar, and someone else's secrets. Elizabeth Glendinning QC has lost faith in the legal system to which she has given her life.

An anonymous letter sent to Larkwood's Prior accuses Peter Henderson, an academic celebrity renowned for daring ideas, of a grotesque murder: the calculated killing of Jenny, his disabled partner, believed by everyone to have died peacefully two years previously from a sudden attack of cancer. But for this letter there is no evidence, no suspect and no crime.