The Fever of the World

Welcome to the Wye Valley – a place of poetry, historic obsession … and occult murder.The curious death of an estate agent is being investigated by detective David Vaynor who, before joining the police, studied the famous 18th century poet William Wordsworth. As Vaynor is discovering, the dark paganism that changed Wordsworth’s life still lingers on the banks of the River Wye today – and there are some killings even the police can’t approach …Enter Merrily Watkins, parish priest, single mum and diocesan exorcist for Hereford. Called away from her local hauntings, Merrily finds herself confronting the riverside ghosts who, as Wordsworth puts it, ‘promote ill purposes and flatter foul desires’. In the ancient heart of the Wye Valley, a buried grudge is about to come to light.

'First rate crime with demons that go bump in the night.' -- Daily Mail
'Few writers blend the ancient and supernatural with the modern and criminal better than Rickman.' -- Guardian

Phil Rickman is the author of the Merrily Watkins mysteries, the new John Dee series and several novels of the paranormal, including two for children under the name Thom Madley. He’s still trying to write the sometimes-transcendental thriller (an all-the-time transcendental thriller would be bloody unreadable, so it’s a balancing act).Born in Lancashire, he’s spent most of his adult life in Wales and the Border country, where he won a couple of awards for his work as a BBC radio and TV news reporter.First novel, Candlenight (1991) was discovered by the novelist and fiction-editor Alice Thomas Ellis and was followed by four other stand-alone ghost stories before the Merrily Watkins series began with The Wine of Angels.Phil lives near Hay-on-Wye with his wife and editor, Carol – they met as journalists on the same paper – and a bunch of animals. He writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf on BBC Radio Wales. Emma Powell is an experienced voice-over artist who has performed for some of the world's most renowned theater companies, including RSC, Almeida, and the National Theatre, and voiced characters for BBC radio dramas as well as countless audiobooks, corporate projects, games, and ads. In 2016 one of her audiobooks, Without a Trace by Lesley Pearce, was the most borrowed audiobook from British libraries, beating Harry Potter into second and third place. She voices the Phil Rickman thrillers, the fantasy Graceling Trilogy, and countless other novels.

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