The Devil's Priest

Liverpool, 1539. A pregnant novice nun, Agnes Moore, ejected from her convent, claims to have been attacked in the ancient chapel of St Mary del Quay by Satan himself. Her former abbess, Lady Katheryn Lukeley, comes to her aid, but Agnes refuses to identify her lover.

When a young priest is found dead in the River Mersey, his right hand hacked off, Katheryn realises that Liverpool harbours some disturbing secrets. Then Agnes is brutally murdered, followed by more deaths - mutilated corpses are discovered in the churchyard. As Katheryn seeks Agnes's killer, she faces the most urgent questions of all - why has such evil come to Liverpool, and who is the Devil's Priest?

©2006 Kate Ellis (P)2008 Soundings

Enjoyable but slow (not an action plot)

Ellis writes a period mystery set in the time of Henry the 8th when he had disbanded the religious houses in order to obtain their wealth for his own use. For my part, I knew very little of this so I found the historical facts interesting. The main character is a determined abbess from one of the closed houses who comes to the aid of one of her former novices. The story moves along as she unravels various murders with the help of a former monk. While not rapid paced, it shed light on that period of history that made me glad I had listened to it. Especially since the end notes of the book indicated that the author kept in a lot of history truth. I found the narrator good with adequate character differentiation.