Death in Holy Orders

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “superbly executed mystery” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from the award-winning master of literary crime fiction.

Within the setting of a great Victorian mansion set on crumbling cliffs—a large cast of variously unscrupulous men and women is brought together in a tangle of murder, mayhem, betrayal, incest, and generally bad behavior.

On the East Anglian seacoast, a small theological college hangs precariously on an eroding shoreline and faces an equally precarious future. When the body of a student is found buried in the sand, the boy’s influential father demands that Scotland Yard investigate.

Enter Adam Dalgliesh, a detective who loves poetry, a man who has known both loss and discovery. Having spent many happy boyhood summers at the school, Dalgliesh is the perfect candidate to look for the truth in this remote, rarified community of the faithful—and the frightened. And when one death leads to another, Dalgliesh finds himself steeped in a world of good and evil, of stifled passions and hidden pasts, where someone has cause not just to commit one crime but to begin an unholy order of murder.