In the Abbeys Shadow

By Matthew Palmer

In the steaming waters of the Roman Baths, a historian's death unearths a conspiracy that some will kill to keep buried.When Dr. Giles Barrington, the meticulous historian for Bath Abbey, is found floating face down in the iconic Roman Baths, investigators quickly realize it is no simple tragedy. He suffered a blunt force head wound, and the agricultural mud on his shoes traces back to "South meadow"-a highly contentious parcel of Abbey-owned land slated for a lucrative development deal with Heritage Gate.Called in to untangle the treacherous, closed-door politics of the Church, ecclesiastical specialists DI Eleanor Brand and DS Matthew Thresher are seconded from Wells to join Bath's DI Paul Lennox. They uncover a bitter institutional divide: Barrington had been refusing to soften his research on historic charitable covenants that threatened to derail the multimillion-pound project. When the Abbey's archive clerk, Dan Harker, later suffers a fatal fall from a ladder and historic diocesan letters begin to selectively vanish, the detectives realize they are hunting a killer who uses convenient accidents as a weapon.Facing off against desperate committees and powerful figures who believe history should be rewritten to protect the Abbey's finances, Brand and Lennox must cut through the polite, defensive maneuvers of Bath's elite to stop a ruthless mastermind from striking again.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H8MBZBFN
• ISBN13: 9798186952473
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 420 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"