The Old Religion
Dark and Chillingly Atmospheric.
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
'Spectacular' Lee Child
'One of the very best crime writers we have' Mark Billingham
Sometimes helping a stranger is the last thing you should do . . .
The Cornish village of St Petroc is the sort of place where people come to hide. Tom Killgannon is one such person. An ex-undercover cop, Tom is in the Witness Protection Programme hiding from some very violent people and St Petroc's offers him a chance to live a safe and quiet life.
Until he meets Lila.
Lila is a seventeen-year-old runaway. When she breaks into Tom's house she takes more than just his money. His wallet holds everything about his new identity. He also knows that Lila is in danger from the travellers' commune she's been living at. Something sinister has been going on there and Lila knows more than she realises.
But to find her he risks not only giving away his location to the gangs he's in hiding from, but also becoming a target for whoever is hunting Lila.
Praise for The Old Religion:
'A raw, deftly-plotted thriller with a dark heart and a real emotional punch' SIMON KERNICK
'A guaranteed thrill-ride' SARAH PINBOROUGH
'Superbly written, creepy as hell, and chilling to the bone. I can't recommend it highly enough!' LUCA VESTE
'Thrillingly atmospheric and unnervingly relevant' CHRISTOPHER BROOKMYRE
'Martyn Waites at his dark and chilling best' EVA DOLAN
'Tom Killgannon is one of the best new characters in modern fiction' STEVE CAVANAGH
'A superbly atmospheric book full of menace and secrets' TOM WOOD
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tom Killgannon, the hero of this uneven gothic mystery from Waites (The Woman in Black: Angel of Death), has settled in St. Petroc, Cornwall, to try to shed a former life he led in another part of England. One stormy day, a troubled, frightened teenager, Lila, takes refuge in his house she's a runaway, hooked up with a community of surfers living in campers on a local beach. Despite Tom's efforts to help her, she sneaks away with his coat containing his passport and ID proof of his new identity that Tom is desperate to get back. The search for Lila takes Tom into the heart of a disturbing plan on the part of a man called Crow to restore St. Petroc to its former glory, using the old religion of the title, a kind of druidic paganism that Crow has convinced the town's seemingly reasonable residents is the key to future prosperity. Set in a gray, forbidding landscape, this grim novel offers a vision of what rural England could become after the U.K. leaves the E.U. Unfortunately, neither Waites's prose nor storytelling does justice to the potential of its harrowing premise.
Customer Reviews
Fantastic
This is undoubtably one of my favourite reads of 2018 so far, if not already my favourite for fiction. I read this book from cover to cover the day that it arrived. I could not put it down, gripped right from the beginning, I had to find the answers to the mysteries of St Petroc and those living there; believe me I was not disappointed. The characters were well developed, some I loved whilst others I loathed. The plot unfolded naturally and the way that all the different parts of the story pulled together kept me turning the pages. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and would recommend it to friends and family, I will also be looking out for more books from the author because this was definitely worth reading.