The Glass Parish by Nell Ashcombe review – a village, a stained-glass window and a murder nobody mentions

Nell Ashcombe has a trick, and it is a good one. Her novels are built around an object, a lighthouse lens in her first, a loom in her second, and now a stained-glass window in a Northumberland church, and the object is always both a thing in the world, carefully and lovingly described, and the lock on a secret. The Glass Parish is the best use of the trick so far.

The window was installed in 1893 in the fictional parish of St Oswin’s, near Rothbury, in memory of a 19-year-old woman, Mercy Hallam, who drowned in the Coquet. In the present day, a glass conservator called Rachel Stroud is sent from Durham to assess it for restoration, and finds, under a century of grime, that the figure of the saint has the dead girl’s face and that a panel at the bottom has been painted over from behind. What is under the paint is the question the novel takes 340 pages to answer, and the answer is both worse and more interesting than the one you will guess at page 60.

Ashcombe alternates Rachel’s chapters with those of Thomas Fenwick, the Newcastle glazier who made the window and who, it becomes clear, knew Mercy rather better than the parish did. The historical sections are the stronger: Ashcombe has clearly spent time in a glass studio, and her descriptions of leading, firing and the business of matching a colour from a quarry are as absorbing as the plot. A passage about the particular blue the Victorians could not reliably make, and what Fenwick does to get it, is the best thing in the book.

The present-day strand is more conventional, and Rachel, a divorced conservator with a difficult mother and a tendency to drink tea at moments of revelation, is a figure we have met before. But Ashcombe gives her a sharp, dry voice, and her professional scenes, a meeting with a diocesan committee that does not want the panel uncovered, a conversation with a churchwarden who knows exactly why, have real menace.

There are longueurs in the middle third, and a subplot involving a developer who wants to buy the church is too obviously there to raise the stakes. But the final 50 pages, in which the two timelines converge on a single winter afternoon in the church, are superbly handled, and the last image, of light through glass falling on a particular flagstone, is earned.

Ashcombe is sometimes shelved as a historical novelist and sometimes as a crime writer. She is both, and neither, and this book, the most assured she has written, should settle the question of whether she matters. She does.

The Glass Parish by Nell Ashcombe is published by Hollins & Wade (£18.99).