Dark Provenance

“Church official Richard Harrison returns to the precincts of Canterbury to find things far from happy. Proposed economic cutbacks and the radical views of the newly appointed Archdeacon are spreading dispondency and discord. Added to this is the mystery surrounding the visit and subsequent death of a man from Harrison’s shadowy past...
Compromised by his own former recommendations and trapped by abiding loyalty to the institution he serves, Harrison risks friendship and reputation by helping to force a harsh rationalization programme on a deeply traditional and conservative Church. In doing so, he finds himself increasingly enmeshed in a web of intrigue. An intrigue whose threads lead back to the 1930s, and the dark secrets of a wartime conspiracy...”

Publisher’s blurb


“The venerable walls of Canterbury Cathedral structure the offbeat plot, foreign intrigue, lively characters, surprising twists and ironic wit of Anthony's (The Becket Factor) rich, labyrinthine mystery. Richard Harrison, a former intelligence major trying to save his marriage to wise, wheelchair-bound Winnie, has retired to the "dull decencies'' of diocesan life, entrusted with repairs. He has returned from a summer in Italy to find a tactless new archdeacon hell-bent on cutting costs and to learn that an old Jewish comrade from de-Nazification days in Berlin tried to visit him a month ago. This man later apparently plunged to his death from a train. Harrison then becomes the unwilling bearer of an eviction notice to the frail old rector of a small church, who is soon found dead in his car, apparently a carbon-monoxide suicide. How are the two deaths related? What, if anything, is the relevance of the recent fall of the Berlin Wall? What is the role of the porcelain figurine of a monkey violinist? From the start, with the bells of Great Dunstan proclaiming the hour, to the finish, as Harrison confronts a killer high in the scaffolding around towering Bell Harry, Anthony's novel offers full, lasting satisfactions.”

US review (Bernstein)