Book description
In Tudor England, in the year 1530, Henry VIII's desire to marry Anne
Boleyn is frustrated by the Pope's unwillingness to grant him a divorce
from his first Queen. The church is still the strongest power in the
land, and the wealthiest. In Norfolk, the town of Castleacre, ancestral
home of the Ackland family, is dependent not on them but upon the great
Cluniac Priory that overshadows it. When Will Ackland, younger son of
an impoverished gentleman, returns home after years abroad he finds his
evil-tempered brother Gilbert cursing the Prior's new bailiff for his
exactions. Then a corpse is discovered, not only stabbed but mutilated
beyond recognition. Is it the Prior's bailiff? If so, Gilbert is the
chief suspect and the townspeople, who enjoy a hanging, will not be
sorry to see him dangling from the gibbet. But Will discovered that
the bailiff had other enemies, some of them in unexpected places. He
discovered, too, that frustrated desire can be as destructive in
Castleacre as at Court. With the help of his irreverent servant, Ned
Pye, he begins to unravel a tangle of concealed passion that leaves more
than one man dead. Sheila Radley was born and brought up in rural
Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose
further education was free. She went from her village school via high
school to London University, where she read history. She served for nine
years as an education officer in the Women's Royal Air Force, then
worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil
servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional
work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post
office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Her first
books, written as Hester Rowan, were three romantic novels; she then
took to crime, and wrote 10 crime novels as Sheila Radley.
