Originally published in Britain as A Question of Integrity, this is the first of a trilogy set in St. Benet’s-by-the-Wall, a “guild church” in London with a mandate to serve the spiritual needs of workers in the city during the week, but with no corresponding parish or services on the weekends. The priest-in-charge is Nick Darrow, a psychic, healer, and exorcist, and he is surrounded in the St. Benet’s rectory with a menagerie that includes a young Irish curate, a superannuated one-time mentor that Nick rescued from collapse, a non-believing youngish spinster acting as cook-housekeeper, a cat named James, and a few others. The action of the story is about what happens when the wheels come off for Nick, and how his over-reliance on his gifts ultimately blinds him to grave dangers. Not everyone comes out alive.

This trilogy is an extension of Howatch’s six-part Starbridge series, which was set in a fictional cathedral city over the span of the middle half of the 20th century. Nick Darrow and a few other characters are carried from Starbridge into London for The Wonder Worker.

Starbridge rivals Trollope’s Barsetshire for a fully-realized ecclesiastical world. It knocked my socks off, and I swallowed it whole after reading the first, Glittering Images. If this sounds like your bag, start there.

Of course here at the Old Rectory we are partial to novels set in rectories. Besides the Starbridge and Barsetshire chronicles, I can also highly recommend Gail Godwin’s Father Melancholy’s Daughter, and Madeline L’Engle’s A Severed Wasp. Are there any other ecclesiastical novels you would suggest? I suppose we should also include monastic novels, like Brother Cadfael mysteries (first-rate), and The Name of the Rose, which hardly needs my recommendation. ( )

The first in the 'St Benet's' series, known in the USA as 'The Wonder Worker'.

This is an amazing book, set around an Anglo-Catholic healing centre in London. Alice, an overweight cook with terrible self-esteem, is helped by Nick, the main preacher/healer. The book is written from different perspectives so that each throws light on what went before. Characters are carefully developed, conversation is believable, and the plots are cleverly woven together. I thought the ending a bit too dramatic and sudden, but other than that thought it great. The first Howatch book I ever read, but certainly not the last! ( )

What does a slightly overweight stay at home daughter do when her life starts to fall apart? She might find God, and since she is a character in a Howatch novel, you can bet she will end up in a church, peopled by real human beings, not spiritual zombies, who have real problems of their own.

And somehow healing happens. ( )