Welcome to Witherleigh is the first book in my new paranormal investigation series following the investigations of Richard Radcliffe, the disgraced son of the charismatic evangelist, Reverend Radcliffe.

    Richard is the black sheep of the Radcliffe herd. One of the top students at Jesus College, Oxford, he was an excellent scholar. The Chancellor had singled him out as having stellar vertical career path in front of him. Unfortunately, the steep vertical climb had gone in the wrong direction when one of the brightest students in Oxford University began to see things which should not be there. 

    Richard was drawn into a deadly possession of the Pembroke family in London as he uncovered a demonic plot to blow up St. Paul’s Cathedral, the powerbase of the Anglican church in London and thereby destabilising the entire Anglican Church. This loss of power would then create a void to be filled by the demonic host. Unfortunately, Richard’s warnings were dismissed as the ravings of the mentally ill and he had spent the night in police cells awaiting a psychiatric review.

     Richard had tried to explain the grave danger to both the family and the Anglican Church to his psychiatrist, Dr Berghaus, and also his father, however, they are both convinced that the pressure of student life had been too great and that it had triggered his previously unknown paranoid schizoid disorder. Richard had been sectioned and confined to the delights of the Nightingale Clinic for an involuntary stay. 

The following evening a special news report flashed across the television screen in the day room. The Pembroke family had been murdered, the walls of their once happy family home, covered in arterial splatter and spray.

    Little paper notes with strange black crosses had been found glued onto every doorway of the house. The police had decided that due to the presence of the notes and their weird symbols, coupled with the extreme manner of the family’s deaths, meant that a demonic cult had caused their deaths.

Richard had stared at the close-up of the crosses. The crosses appeared to be that of double-lined cross of the Patriarch, the inverted cross of St Peter, the cut-out square of St Michael, and the traditional Latin cross - a strangely Christian mixture for a demon worshipping set. However, he said nothing. He had learnt his lesson. Only the mad and dangerous spoke of demons and witchcraft. Richard had banished such dangerous thoughts from his mind. After a six-month stay in the clinic, he had been discharged by his father and sent to rural Devon, an idyllic, quiet, if slightly backward part of England, where he could recover, and all thoughts of demons and ghosts would disappear. 

    Twenty-four hours later he had met Snowy.