The Echo of Crows by Phil Rickman

 

As unlikely it sounds, even as anti-clerical and irreligious as I am, I have enjoyed Phil Rickman's series of novels about a Church of England exorcist (the Church still has them, but now calls them "Deliverance Ministers"), and the mysteries she encounters which, if I recall correctly, usually seem to have solutions that are in large part material, but don't rule out the supernatural.

One of the ongoing threads in the novel is the tension between the exorcist, Merrily Watkins, and the increasingly secularizing Church which no longer has much time for woo-woo explanations of evil. That, for the space of the novels, my sympathies were with Merrily is surely the result of Rickman's skill in creating characters who convince us. And as is the case with all successful series, it is the recurring characters that keep us coming back. We look forward to updates about the lives of her crusty old mentor, about Merrily's lover, Lol, a folkie singer-songwriter who is almost a success, about the hard-nosed police detective who, as the novels proceed, becomes more and more sympathetic to the notion that maybe those things that go bump in the night are real, and many more.

The Echo of Crows is billed as the final novel in the series, and I'm sorry for that. I would have continued reading. I hold out hope, though, because, though a few threads are tied off at the end, there's no reason the series couldn't continue. Merrily, for example, has not fallen off a cliff to her death, as Sherlock Holmes was thought to have done before making his surprising and very welcome reappearance in The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

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