St Benets Trilogy

This is the last set of novels written by Susan Howatch, who has not written anything for many years. They are set in the City of London, in one of the churches there, which has a Healing Centre which is open to everyone. Nick Darrow and Lewis Hall are the 2 priests who run it, who were important characters in the Starbridge novels. The books are less good than the Starbridge series. Howatch chose to concentrate on lay people who are involved with the church, more than with the clergy, and I think it suffers from that. She was not a young woman by the time she started the St Benets series, and I think her knowledge of non church going people in the 1980s and 90s was limited, and she also chose to bring in a lot of stuff about the Occult and the sex industry, which again, she probalby had no real experience with. But her novels all have something good in them, so I enjoy re reading them. I will write a bit more about the contents of the novels in my next blog.