A Long Hot Unholy Summer - Tapa dura

'Teresa Waugh, who seems to know her setting intimately and clearly sympathises and empathises with all her characters, has produced a most intriguing, low-key mystery' --Literary Review

'Waugh brilliantly contrasts the serenity of the rural landscape with the ever-lurking dark danger. A draining but compelling read' --The Lady

Isabelle, a young girl on holiday with her family in France, disappears with a man she meets online - unaware of his troubled past and twisted sexual nature. Not knowing what's become of her, we follow Etienne as he drives frantically across the country and share in the long anguish of the missing girl's family as the police fail to find her. Meanwhile, a young woman's strangled body is found on a beach. In the deep heart of France, an old woman prays to a long dead archbishop whose biography Isabelle's mother is writing - entreating that he intercede with the Almighty for the girl's safe return, as a young parish priest, the old woman's protege who's fallen guiltily in love with the missing teenager, sets out on a mission to find her. Strange coincidences link the eighteenth-century archbishop to the present with the suggestion that, shaped by time and circumstance, we are all equally guilty or equally innocent; from the modern-day teenager to the sybaritic prelate or the serial killer. Some of us are just not tempted to murder...