Recently retired detective Reg Wexford has just launched his first retirement project—the reading of Gibbon’s ‘Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire’—when he is called back in as an advisor on the murder of Rev. Sarah Hussain. Rev. Sarah happened to be his very controversial local vicar: mixed race, single mother with a teenaged daughter, ordained late in life, and thoroughly modern. Her murder provides Rendell the opportunity to explore all sorts of issues—racism and misogyny among people of faith is an important example—and passages from Gibbon throw modern issues into high relief. Now separated from his police tools and authority, Wexford has to rely on his people and conversational skills and his instincts, and he’s not sure whether he likes that much. “Not for the first time but perhaps more positively and tellingly than before, he was realising how insignificant he had become in the great scheme of law and order, of lawmaking and law-implementing, of having nothing to do in a society where doing things was all-important” (242). But his advisor status also creates a perspective that benefits the case *and* the novel. This is a quiet police procedural, with few scary climaxes, but it’s an enjoyable difference.