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 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

‘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
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

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

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
.

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