The lamp of the wicked

Overshadowed by high-voltage power lines, the unlovely village of Underhowle is on the brink of a new prosperity after half a century of decay. But the community is also home a to a man the police have identified as the killer of several young women. Had it not been for the Rev Merrily Watkins, Deliverance Consultant to the Diocese of Hereford, and her gravedigger, Gomer Parry, the truth might never have emerged.

But is it the whole truth? As the police search for more bodies, Merrily worries that the detective in charge might have become blinkered by personal ambition. And when, after the horrific climax to a very public confession, she is asked to conduct a controversial funeral, she becomes exposed to hidden tensions in Underhowle, as volatile as the 400,000 volts passing overhead. For is there really connection with the most sickening series of murders recorded in Britain in the past century?

Meanwhile, in her home parish of Ledwardine, Merrily has more intimate problems: the need for discretion over her new relationship with the musician Lol Robinson; and the alleged angelic visitations on which even her usually impressionable daughter heaps scorn. Battling his own demons to face an audience for the first time in nearly twenty years, Lol follows an unexpected path into the mind of the confessed murderer while Merrily tries to quell her own revulsion in an effort to scrub away the psychic stain left by a dead monster.