The Fever of the World

Merrily Watkins Mysteries, Book 16

By: Phil Rickman

Narrated by: Emma Powell

Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins

Publisher's summary

A chilling and transfixing new Merrily Watkins mystery.

Information

'I called on darkness...midnight darkness....'

At the end of the 18th century, the poet William Wordsworth rambled, in a strange visionary haze, from Salisbury Plain up into the Wye Valley. The epic walk changed his life.

More than 200 years later, Oxford student David Vaynor followed the same secluded route and still can't explain what happened to him there. Now he's back, as a police detective investigating a suspicious death, and finds that, in this place of cliffs and chasms, it's far from easy to escape the past.

Meanwhile, Merrily Watkins, diocesan exorcist for Hereford, is being warned that in-depth investigation is not part of her job—a job she may not be holding down for very long. She'll be risking her future to help Vaynor uncover the secrets carried through a haunted landscape by Britain's most revered river.

For behind the scenic beauty are elements that, as Wordsworth wrote, 'promote ill purposes and flatter foul desires.'

©2019 Phil Rickman (P)2022 Bolinda Publishing

Finally more Merrilly

Rickman weaves Wordsworth into the atmosphere of this novel so beautifully. Maybe not the very strongest of the series but evoking the emotions of the early pandemic was very effective and an organic part of the story

Time for Diocese to Disband Deliverance

An on-going theme in the Merrily Watkins book is her desire to convince the Diocese that a Deliverance person is needed. After this book, I say shut it down! This particular story involves murders and a sort of vague loosely tethered folklore, but the plot seems to be a collage of under developed ideas . Rickman tries really hard to spin the tale around the life of a famous dead poet, but this is not essential or even important to the plot. There are rumors of caves. There may be good and bad Druids. Maybe there was a ghost sighting a century before. There is no spiritual crises and there is no description of the denouement....no description of what actually happened when a principle character encounters the very weird chick in the woods...because the principle has no recall of the event and the-old-guy-to-the-rescue explanation is not shown in real time but offered sort of as a footnote in the closing pages. At the very end, a recurring character alludes to a new death as a murder and I thought, "What? Where is that surmise coming from?" I have bought and read all the Merrily books to date. I kept hoping that each new book will be more satisfying. Rickman has written several other stand alone books which are clearly "horror" or at least spooky and are satisfying even if a bit silly at times. This Merrily series no longer has any juice.