The Remains of an Altar

In 1934 the dying composer Sir Edward Elgar feebly whistled to a friend the theme from his Cello Concerto and said, "If you're walking on the Malvern Hills and hear that, don't be frightened. It's only me."

Seventy years later, Merrily Watkins – parish priest and deliverance consultant to the Diocese of Hereford – is called in to investigate an alleged paranormal dimension in a spate of road accidents in the Malvern village of Wychehill. There, Merrily discovers new tensions in Elgar's countryside. The proposed takeover of a local pub by a nightclub owner with a criminal reputation has become the battleground between the defenders of Olde Englande and the hard men of the drug world – with extreme and sinister elements on both sides. And as the choral society prepares to stage an open-air performance of Elgar's Caractacus at a prehistoric hill fort, the deaths begin.