The Four Last Things Read online

  With sudden clarity he saw the child she had once been. In his mind he saw her running down the path towards the garden door into the house, saw her looking up at his face as he stood waiting in the doorway.

  ‘Hello, Father,’ she said, and smiled.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrew Taylor is the award-winning author of a number of crime novels, including the Dougal series, the Lydmouth books and The Barred Window. His critically acclaimed, award-winning historical thriller, The American Boy, is a Richard and Judy Book Club Selection. He and his wife live with their children in the Forest of Dean.

  The Four Last Things is the first volume of Andrew Taylor’s Roth Trilogy. The next two novels in the sequence, The Judgement of Strangers and The Office of the Dead, are also available in paperback. The Roth Trilogy is now published in an omnibus edition, entitled Requiem for an Angel.

  www.andrew-taylor.co.uk

  PRAISE

  Praise for Andrew Taylor

  ‘Andrew Taylor is a master of the corrosive passions that fester beneath conventional façades’

  VAL MCDERMID

  ‘Taylor is a writer blessed with great compassion as well as an unerring eye for historical detail. His flawed heroes and heroines and narrators are people you have met before in the street’

  FRANCIS FYFIELD, Sunday Express

  ‘Like Hitchcock, Taylor pitches extreme and gothic events within a hair’s breadth of normality’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Taylor is a major thriller writer’

  Time Out

  ‘One of Britain’s best writers of psychological suspense’

  The Times

  ‘Taylor, who is a successful and subtle crime novelist, works a delicate and difficult game successfully’

  Spectator

  Praise for The Roth Trilogy

  ‘Skilful, elegant, powerfully atmospheric, in which ancient evil shimmers like images trapped in a corridor of mirrors’

  PHILIP OAKLEY, Literary Review

  ‘An intelligent, exciting psychological drama … A powerful feeling of something nasty just around the corner prevails’

  Daily Mail

  ‘The writing is consistently good’

  DONNA LEON, Sunday Times

  ‘It deals in the quietest, most civilized way, with abominable suffering … a highly sinister piece of work’

  NATASHA COOPER, Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Complex, with lots of sinister implications … moves the traditional crime novel on to some deeper level of exploration’

  JANE JAKEMAN, Independent

  ‘A trilogy which spans both history and geography … masterly’

  GERALD KAUFMAN, Scotsman

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  Caroline Minuscule

  Waiting for the End of the World

  Our Fathers’ Lies

  An Old School Tie

  Freelance Death

  The Second Midnight

  Blacklist

  Blood Relation

  Toyshop

  The Raven on the Water

  The Sleeping Policeman

  The Barred Window

  Odd Man Out

  The Air that Kills

  The Mortal Sickness

  The Lover of the Grave

  The Judgement of Strangers

  The Suffocating Night

  Where Roses Fade

  The Office of the Dead

  Death’s Own Door

  Requiem for an Angel

  The American Boy

  COPYRIGHT

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters

  and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s

  imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living

  or dead, events orlocalities is entirely coincidental.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  This edition 2001

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

  Copyright © Andrew Taylor 1997

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013

  Cover photography © Mark Pennington

  Andrew Taylor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  Source ISBN: 9780007105113

  Ebook Edition JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780007502011

  Version 2

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