The Wine of Angels

By: Phil Rickman

Narrated by: Rebecca Lacey

The new vicar had never wanted a picture-postcard parish – or a huge and haunted vicarage. Nor had she wanted to walk into a dispute over a controversial play about a 17th-century clergyman accused of witchcraft ... a story that certain long-established families would rather remained obscure. But this is Ledwardine, steeped in cider and secrets ... a paradise of cobbled streets and timber-framed houses. And also – as Merrily Watkins and her teenage daughter, Jane, discover – a village where horrific murder is a tradition that spans centuries.©1998 Phil Rickman (P)2006 Isis Audio

Critic reviews

"Few writers blend the ancient and supernatural with the modern and criminal better than Rickman." (Guardian)

"First rate crime with demons that go bump in the night." (Daily Mail)

"Phil Rickman is one of my all-time favourites." (Diana Gabaldon, international best-selling author)

Interesting story and setting with horrible narration

I enjoyed the setting and the story, but I was taken out of it so much by the narrator. There is something about the way she mumbles words and lowers her volume that would make me tune out and practically disassociate in a way that has never happened to me with an audiobook. I would listen to long chunks and then realize I was daydreaming and hadn’t absorbed or comprehended any of what she had been saying. I will never read a book narrated by this person again

We Love Merrily

Excellent narration and a cracking good story. Highly recommend. On to the next book in the ser!

Eeriness in the English countryside

Enjoyed the underlying mood of menace coupled with the deep dark secrets of the Church. Well worth reading. Great intro to the Merrily Watkins series

So Good!!

The story was really good but the Reader was AMAZING! Her storytelling really made all the characters feel real.

Mixed experience

The premise of a woman Anglican priest in a haunted vicarage in a pagan town is intriguing. The story does not benefit from the unnecessary introduction of a racial stereotype to indicate a fraught event, but the narrator's incredible ability to make a range of distinguishable male and female voices with credible regional accents, educations and ages is very impressive. The production, however, suffers from being recorded at so low a volume that it constantly needs the listener's full attention, ear to device, to be heard.