'To keep quiet about something so important... well, it's almost a lie, wouldn't you say?' When Father Anselm meets Kate Seymour in the cemetery at Larkwood, he is dismayed to hear her allegation. Herbert Moore had been one of the founding fathers of the Priory, revered by all who met him, a man who'd shaped Anselm's own vocation.

What should you do if the world has turned against you? When Father Anselm is asked this question by an old man at Larkwood Priory, his response is to have greater resonance than he could ever have imagined. For that evening the old man returns, demanding the protection of the church. His name is Eduard Schwermann and he is wanted by the police as a suspected war criminal.

In his first novel, The Sixth Lamentation, William Brodrick introduced Father Anslem, the barrister turned monk who found himself plunged into the tangled history of occupied Paris. Now, in The Gardens of the Dead, Father Anslem is brought back to his own past at the Bar, and someone else's secrets. Elizabeth Glendinning QC has lost faith in the legal system to which she has given her life.

A man arrives at Larkwood Monastery claiming sanctuary. Edward Schwermann is accused of Nazi war crimes: the chances are he's stained with blood, but politics demand that Larkwood shelter him. And Schwermann has intimated that the Church offered him sanctuary once before, during the war. It is this potentially embarrassing claim which brings Father Anselm onto centre stage.

Stories of wartime France, present-day England, a Nazi criminal, and a dying woman intersect in this elegant literary thriller.