There always comes a time when every narrator of historical fiction ends up tackling the current thriller with its added suspense due to the dark setting of remote times. Robert Harris was not going to be an exception. In a society where faith and dogma have banished reason and science, a priest investigates the death of a rural vicar.
Great Britain, year 1468. The priest Christopher Fairfax arrives in a remote village sent by the Bishop of Exeter to celebrate the funeral of the vicar who had just died. The deceased, a passionate collector of artifacts from other times, was accidentally killed while digging in the vicinity. Fairfaix stays in the vicarage and in the rooms of the deceased religious discovers a collection of objects considered heretical, and texts of specialists in the past that suggest a different truth to the doctrine of the Church, which affirms that the man was punished with the four plagues: epidemics, war, famine and death after having surrendered to science and technology.
Only the return to faith in Christ saved humanity in extremis. Fairfax discovers that the tower next to which the vicar died contains numerous vestiges of the lost civilization, and all the evidence indicates that someone deposited them there thinking of a future where it would be possible to rebuild it. The reading of the heretical books that question the omnipotent power of God and the causes of the Apocalypse, together with the investigations that immerse him in that isolated community will shake the faith and beliefs of the young priest.
