The Office of the Dead (34 page)
Andrew Taylor
Andrew Taylor is the award-winning author of a number of crime novels, including the Dougal series, the Lydmouth books and
The Barred Window.
His critically acclaimed, award-winning historical thriller,
The American Boy
, is a Richard and Judy Book Club Selection. He and his wife live with their children in the Forest of Dean.
The Office of the Dead
is the third volume of Andrew Taylor’s Roth Trilogy.
The Office of the Dead
is the third novel in the Roth Trilogy, which deals layer by layer with the linked histories of the Appleyards and the Byfields. Each book may be read on its own as a self-contained story. The three novels are also designed to work together, though they may be read in any order.
The first novel,
The Four Last Things
, is set in London during the middle of the 1990s. The second,
The Judgement of Strangers
, is set in Roth, a remote suburb of London, in 1970.
Andrew Taylor
‘Andrew Taylor is a master of the corrosive passions that fester beneath conventional façades’
VAL MCDERMID
‘Taylor is a writer blessed with great compassion as well as an unerring eye for historical detail. His flawed heroes and heroines and narrators are people you have met before in the street’
FRANCIS FYFIELD
,
Sunday Express
‘Like Hitchcock, Taylor pitches extreme and gothic events within a hair’s breadth of normality’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Taylor is a major thriller writer’
Time Out
‘One of Britain’s best writers of psychological suspense’
The Times
‘Taylor, who is a successful and subtle crime novelist, works a delicate and difficult game successfully’
Spectator
The Roth Trilogy
‘Skilful, elegant, powerfully atmospheric, in which ancient evil shimmers like images trapped in a corridor of mirrors’
PHILIP OAKLEY
,
Literary Review
‘An intelligent, exciting psychological drama … A powerful feeling of something nasty just around the corner prevails’
Daily Mail
‘The writing is consistently good’
DONNA LEON
,
Sunday Times
‘It deals in the quietest, most civilized way with abominable suffering … a highly sinister piece of work’
NATASHA COOPER
,
Times Literary Supplement
‘Complex, with lots of sinister implications … moves the traditional crime novel on to some deeper level of exploration’
JANE JAKEMAN
,
Independent
‘A trilogy which spans both history and geography … masterly’
GERALD KAUFMAN
,
Scotsman
Caroline Minuscule
Waiting for the End of the World
Our Fathers’ Lies
An Old School Tie
Freelance Death
The Second Midnight
Blacklist
Blood Relation
Toyshop
The Raven on the Water
The Sleeping Policeman
The Four Last Things
The Barred Window
Odd Man Out
The Air that Kills
The Mortal Sickness
The Lover of the Grave
The Judgement of Strangers
The Suffocating Night
Where Roses Fade
Death’s Own Door
Requiem for an Angel
The American Boy
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters
and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s
imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, events orlocalities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollins
Publishers
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London W6 8JB
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This edition 2000
First published in Great Britain by
HarperCollins
Publishers
1999
Copyright © Andrew Taylor 1999.
Cover layout design © HarperCollins
Publishers
Ltd 2013
Cover photography © Mark Pennington
Andrew Taylor asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780006496557
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007502035
Version 2
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.
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