Murder at St Cedds

Cathedrals are built to endure storms. But some sins refuse to stay buried in the dust.

When volunteer archivist Henry Vellum falls to his death from the bell tower of St Cedd's during Saturday Evensong, the parish is eager to call it a tragic accident. Detective Inspector Eleanor Brand knows better.

Raised in a vicarage, Brand understands the polite silences and protective hierarchies of the Church. On the belfry steps she finds deliberately cut ropes, traces of pre-Reformation sealing wax and a fragment of fifteenth-century manuscript clenched in the dead man's hand. The parchment describes the fall of a brother from the same tower, in the year 1473.

Facing a wall of institutional silence from a diocese determined to protect its founding myths, Brand watches the violence spread inside the cathedral's own walls. To catch a killer she has to pull at a centuries-old thread, even if the whole institution threatens to come down on her.