ISBN 0-241-11664-3 (UK hbk, 1986)

"In the London of the early eighteenth century Nicholas Dyer, architect, is planning to build a number of churches. He is a part of the Age of Enlightenment, that period obsessed with the notion of scientific progress and with the primacy of Reason, but he is an uneasy representative of it: he has older and darker allegiances which affect his relationship with such institutions as the Royal Society and which also determine the course of his private life and the nature of his churches.

"Nicholas Hawksmoor is a twentieth-century man, a senior detective in the C.I.D. who is investigating a series of murders which have occurred on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches in London. He, like Dyer before him, is racked with doubts and on the verge of mental disintegration. The stench and violence of the eighteenth century, the horrors of Bedlam, the casual murder, all these seem to reach out over two hundred and fifty years, as events from each part of history seem to echo each other and, in so doing, to change each other." [jacket blurb, UK hbk, 1986]

Recommended.