Blood in the MortarSecrets in the Vestry

Some institutions are built on faith. Others are built on a lie that demands blood.

When structural surveyor Sally Graham is found dead in the freezing crypt of a parish church, it looks like a tragic accident. She was only measuring a wall. When the Reverend David Preece bleeds to death on his own chancel steps weeks later, the ancient silence of the Salisbury Cathedral Close is shattered.

DI Eleanor Brand knows how to read a crime scene, but this case asks her to read the silence of a six-hundred-year-old institution. Met by a slick diocesan press office, closed-door meetings and the imposing Chancellor Sterling, Brand and DS Thresher come to see that they are hunting someone who has protected a lucrative, centuries-old fraud.

Then diocesan administrator Catherine Priestly stumbles on a suppressed medieval ledger whose Latin charters could bankrupt the diocese. As a winter storm batters the old stone of Salisbury, Catherine becomes a target, and the Cathedral shows it will sacrifice anything, and anyone, to survive.