When the Devil was Sick

Clere House in northern England is a place rife with superstition, and every Lammas Night a meal is laid out there for a ghostly monk, who is thought to haunt the property. But this year when Lammas Night comes around, the phantom’s repast is accompanied by the unfortunate occurrence of Mrs. Saint Claire, matriarch of the house, falling to her death. And when local GP Henry Sanderson turns up with his friend and colleague Richard Vaile to inspect the body, Vaile discovers another corpse behind a curtain – that of a man in monk’s costume, face-down in his dinner.

The first novel to be republished in the Inspector Charles Ryvet series by Carol Carnac – a pseudonym used by Edith Caroline Rivett, who also wrote as ECR Lorac – this is an atmospheric country house mystery with some grippingly dysfunctional family dynamics at play. Can the master detective put superstition and the supernatural to one side, and find a more earthly solution to the two deaths?