Has anyone read any of Phil Rickman's novels?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

They're their own genre, the ecclesiastical supernatural murder mystery. The main character is a woman priest in the Church of England who lives with her rebellious teenage daughter. In the first book, The Wine of Angels, she deals with uncanny happenings in her village parish near the Welsh border. I picked up the second book Midwinter of the Spirit, because it takes place in Hereford, a city I will be spending some time in this summer.

The plots are too complicated to describe in a paragraph, but one part of the denouement really struck me, given the times we live on, something about how some of the greatest evil occurs as the result of cynical non-believers assuming the trappings of religion for personal gain. I couldn't help thinking of the televangelists and certain members of our government, although the character that this describes is neither.

As I understand from reading Rickman's website, he started out as a fantasy-horror writer, but his ecclesiastical series has really taken off in England.