Phil Rickman has 8 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.7★ across 7 ratings. The most-rated is All of a Winter's Night.
All of a Winter's Night
Summary
When Aidan Lloyd's bleak funeral is followed by a nocturnal ritual in the fog, it becomes all too clear that Aidan, son of a wealthy farmer, will not be resting in peace. Aidan's hidden history has reignited an old feud, and a rural tradition begins to display its sinister side.
It's already a fraught time for Merrily Watkins, her future threatened by a bishop committed to restricting her role as diocesan exorcist for Hereford. Suddenly there are events she can't talk about as she and her daughter, Jane, find themselves potentially on the wrong side of the law.
In the city of Hereford, DI Frannie Bliss, investigating a shooting, must confront the apparent growth of organised crime, also contaminating the countryside. On the Welsh border, the old ways are at war with the modern world. As the days shorten and the fog gives way to ice and snow, a savage killing draws Merrily Watkins into a conflict centred on one of Britain's most famous medieval churches, its walls laden with ancient symbolism.
©2017 Phil Rickman (P)2017 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
The Magus of Hay
Summary
A man's body is found below a waterfall. It looks like suicide or an accidental drowning – until DI Frannie Bliss enters the dead man's home. What he finds there sends him to Merrily Watkins, the Diocese of Hereford's official advisor on the paranormal. It's nearly 40 years since Hay was declared an independent state by its self-styled king. A development seen at the time as a joke, a publicity scam. But behind this pastiche a dark design was taking shape, creating a hidden history of murder and ritual-magic, the relics of which are only now becoming horribly visible. It's a situation that will take Merrily Watkins – alone for the first time in years – to the edge of madness.
©2013 Phil Rickman (P)2014 Isis Publishing Ltd
Friends of the Dusk
Summary
When autumn storms blast Hereford, centuries-old human bones are found among the roots of a blown down tree. At the nearby Cathedral, another storm is building around a new bishop who believes that the Church must phase out irrelevant archaic practices. Not good news for Merrily Watkins, consultant on the paranormal. Especially as she's now presented with the job at its most medieval. A rambling 12th-century house is thought to be haunted. Although its new owners don't believe in ghosts, they do believe in the need for exorcism. Merrily's discovery of the house's links with the medieval legend of a man who resisted mortality threatens to expose the hidden history of a more modern cult and its trail of insidious abuse.
©2015 Phil Rickman (P)2016 Isis Publishing Ltd
The House of Susan Lulham
Summary
A new husband and a new house. Just as well, because Zoe doesn't like old. Back in the 1960s, this house was built to look ultra modern, with lots of glass and sharp angles. And it was going cheap, perhaps because of the self-inflicted death of a previous owner - notoriously bloody and prolonged. But Zoe didn't know that. And if her husband Jonathan knew, he kept very quiet. How is Merrily Watkins, diocesan exorcist for Hereford, to know what’s behind Zoe’s claim that the late Susan Lulham is still in residence? Sceptical neighbours seem unlikely to help, and fresh blood will decorate the pristine white walls of the new house before its secret history begins, at last, to leak out.
©2014 Phil Rickman (P)2015 Isis Publishing Ltd
The Fabric of Sin
Summary
Garway church was built by medieval Knights Templar. After seven centuries, the Welsh border village is still shadowed in their mysteries. Why do the local pubs have astrological names? What happened in Garway to intimidate the Edwardian ghost-story writer M. R James? And why is it impossible to find a builder prepared to restore the ancient Master House, a few fields away from Garway church? Deliverance consultant Merrily Watkins is ordered to investigate by the Bishop Hereford. Initially unconvinced that anything is amiss, a violent death changes everything, and Merrily's inquiries soon uncover hidden layers of sin and retribution in this secretive landscape. Warned off when she stumbles into forbidden areas, Merrily has no option but to conceal a major crime as she returns to Garway to find fibres of fear stitched into history and insidiously twisted in the corridors and the cloisters Âof power.
©2007 Phil Rickman (P)2008 Quercus
The Secrets of Pain
Summary
Join Merrily Watkins - parish priest, single mother and exorcist - in her 11th chilling tale of murder, mystery and intrigue. The elite warriors of the Hereford-based SAS know all about pain and the enduring of it. Syd Spicer, ex-SAS trooper, has found himself back in the regiment - this time as its chaplain, responsible for the spiritual welfare of the hardest men in or out of uniform. Faced with a case which would normally be passed discreetly to Hereford diocesan exorcist Merrily Watkins, Spicer is forced, for security reasons, to try and handle it himself - and is coming close to a breakdown. Meanwhile, the scattered communities along the Welsh border have their own crisis. With recession biting deep, urban crime has spilled into the countryside, and old barbaric evils are revived. When a wealthy landowner is hacked to death in his own farmyard, the senior investigating officer, DI Frannie Bliss, is caught in the backlash, his private life in danger of exposure. With the framework of her own world beginning to crack, Merrily is persuaded to venture into areas where neither a priest nor a woman is welcome to unearth secrets linked with the border's pagan past. Secrets which she knows can never be disclosed.
©2011 Phil Rickman (P)2012 Isis Audio Books
For the Hell of It
Summary
A chilling and transfixing new Merrily Watkins mystery. Information 'I called on darkness...midnight darkness....' At the end of the 18th century, the poet William Wordsworth rambled, in a strange visionary haze, from Salisbury Plain up into the Wye Valley. The epic walk changed his life. More than 200 years later, Oxford student David Vaynor followed the same secluded route and still can't explain what happened to him there. Now he's back, as a police detective investigating a suspicious death, and finds that, in this place of cliffs and chasms, it's far from easy to escape the past. Meanwhile, Merrily Watkins, diocesan exorcist for Hereford, is being warned that in-depth investigation is not part of her job – a job she may not be holding down for very long. She'll be risking her future to help Vaynor uncover the secrets carried through a haunted landscape by Britain's most revered river. For behind the scenic beauty are elements that, as Wordsworth wrote, 'promote ill purposes and flatter foul desires.
©2019 Phil Rickman (P)2019 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Candlenight
Summary
Corpse candles. Phantom funerals. The bird of death. It was insidious.... For Bethan, the schoolteacher, the old superstitions woven into the social fabric of her West Wales village are primitive and distasteful. Which is why she's pleased to welcome the sophisticated newcomers: London journalist Giles Freeman and his wife, Claire. Surely they'll let in some fresh air. But the Freemans are keen to absorb this different culture, a whole new way of life - rejecting the advice of an old colleague who warns them of a hard and bitter land where they've always danced on the edge of the abyss. They soon learn that this community hides an ancient, bloody, and pagan secret - one that will haunt them forever....
©1991 Phil Rickman (P)2015 Isis Publishing Ltd