Recent crime books

The Stranger House by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins, £12.99) is not a Dalziel and Pascoe detective novel but a highly enjoyable gothic confection. Two strangers are brought reluctantly together in the village of Illthwaite in Cumbria. Sam Flood, a small, red-headed Australian woman of 24, is about to take up a post at Cambridge as a mathematician but stops off at this gloomy village to explore her ancestry. Specifically she wants to find out more about her grandmother, also called Sam Flood, who was sent as an orphaned child to make a new life in Australia in 1960 but who did not long survive the experience. The only thing she knows about her is that she had once lived in Illthwaite. The locals, a backward-looking lot, deny all knowledge of her, but on that first day Sam is nearly killed in the village church, and later discovers an overgrown plaque with the name Sam Flood on it in the graveyard wall.

The second visitor to Illthwaite, who is also putting up at the ancient pub, the Stranger House, is a young Spaniard, Miguel (known as Mig) Ramos Elking- ton Madero, who has recently left a Spanish seminary, having abandoned his vocation. Gaunt, with a limp and dressed entirely in black with an unusually old-fashioned mien, he has carried in secret the stigmata from early childhood. It was this affliction that gave him the idea that he was meant to become a priest rather than a wine-grower. He also sees ghosts. Like Sam he is on a quest into the past — in his case, researching an ancestor who came over as a boy in the Spanish Armada but failed to return home. It is all mixed up with an English priest, Father Simeon, who was tortured, though not martyred, during the reign of Elizabeth I and whose descendants now live in the big house on the hill.