Anchoress of Shere

9781590580288

1590580281

Anchoress of Shere is a compelling crime story, set in two different centuries. It depicts the story of a beautiful woman, Christine, as she is walled up alive in a church. The location is Shere in the County of Surrey, England. The historical records, which still exist, put the date at 1329. The twentieth-century chronicler of the fate of Christine Carpenter, the Anchoress of Shere, is a deranged Catholic priest, Father Michael Duval. Gradually, two separate sagas unfold: the bizarre world of the Middle Ages centred on Christine's entombment, and the abduction of a young woman, Marda Stewart, in Guildford, Surrey, in 1967. In a series of exotic twists the medieval world of knights, debauchery, peasant uprisings and civil war merges into a modern hunt for a serial killer. The final piece of the puzzle is discovered in the late 1990s. The tragedy of the anchoress is based upon historical fact, yet it is also an exploration of the most dramatic themes of today: the power of belief, sexual freedom, spiritual bondage and the individual search for self-fulfillment. Above all, this is a gripping adventure story of a love so obsessive that it spans more than six hundred years.