The Old Religion by Martyn Waites
Nov. 30th, 2025 09:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
Welcome to the dark heart of Cornwall …
The Cornish village of St Petroc is the sort of place where people come to hide. Tom Kilgannon is one such person. An ex-undercover cop, Tom is in the Witness Protection Programme hiding from some very violent people, and St Petroc’s offers him a chance to lice a safe and anonymous life.
Until he meets Lila.
Lila is a seventeen-year-old runaway. When she breaks into Tom’s house she takes more than just his money. His wallet holds everything about his new identity. He also knows that Lila is in danger from the travellers’ commune she’s been living in. Something sinister has been going on there and Lila knows more than she realises.
But to find her he risks not only giving away his location to the gangs he’s hiding from, but also becoming a target for whoever is hunting Lila.
Tom Kilgannon is a former soldier from Middlesborough who now works as a barman in the sleepy town of St Petroc in Northern Cornwall. St Petroc is a forgotten and dying place, ignored by tourists and dependent on fishing, which has been hit since the Brexit vote. Its best chance of survival is a bid it has made for central government funds to redevelop the marina, but it’s up against better known areas and privately, Tom doesn’t really rate its chances.
Not that Tom wants St Petroc to win because Tom Kilgannon is not his real name - it’s the identity he assumed when he entered Witness Protection after something went wrong when he was working as an undercover police officer - and the last thing he wants is more people visiting St Petroc because it increases the risk of someone recognising him and blowing his cover. The only people who know Tom’s real identity are Janet, the therapist he is seeing to help him deal with the fall out from his time as an undercover officer, and PC Rachel Bellfair, his liaison officer with whom he has been having an ill judged affair.
But everything changes when he comes home from his shift in the pub to find that 17-year-old Lila has broken into his home, looking for shelter and something to eat. Lila ran away from home a couple of years ago and has been living in a commune close to St Petroc with her boyfriend Kai. The commune is led by Noah who rules with an iron fist - anyone who disagrees with his rules disappears, their bodies turning up in the sea weeks later. Lila knows that Noah was involved in the disappearance of university student Kyle Tanner because she helped to kidnap him but now she’s having second thoughts and she knows that Noah will try to silence her for good. Before she can tell the whole story to Ben, they’re interrupted by a visit from Rachel and by the time Tom gets rid of her, Lila has disappeared taking Tom’s coat - which contains his undercover ID documents - with her.
Anxious to get his ID back, Tom decides to search for her but as he does so, he realises that there’s something else going on in St Petroc. Something sinister. Something deadly. Something that makes him question everything he thought he knew about the town and its inhabitants …
Martyn Waites’s novel (the first in a series) marries thriller and folk horror but because there’s so much going on it’s less than the sum of its parts. It has good pacing and there are some creepy moments, but the plot is heavily contrived at times and neither Tom nor Lila quite convince as characters while the antagonist is similarly underdeveloped. It’s not a bad book, I kept turning the pages, but it wasn’t as satisfying a read as I’d hoped.
I picked this up because I was intrigued by the back cover copy and I’m a bit of a sucker for reads with a folk horror, THE WICKER MAN vibe to it. Waites has published other crime thrillers under the pseudonym Tania Carver, but I hadn’t read them.
To be fair to Waites, the folk horror elements work fairly well in the book. There’s a genuinely chilling quality to the scenes where the Morrigan visits a number of St Petroc residents and I liked the way Waites keeps open whether what happens to them is genuinely due to the Morrigan’s powers and the use of the old religion or whether it is all coincidental. Equally chilling are the scenes towards the end of the book where the extent of the Morrigan’s power and influence are revealed and a scene involving one of the bar flys who drink at the pub where Tom works gets under your skin in a flesh crawling way.
The problem is that as Waites says in an author note at the back that he threw everything into it - folk horror, crime, Brexit - and it shows. There is a lot going on here from Tom’s background as an undercover cop to Lila’s background as an abused teen, county lines gangs, cuckooing, the impact of Brexit on rural communities, power, control, and paganism. I think it’s too much for one book and I would have preferred it had some of the themes been pared back.
Tom and Lila’s backgrounds in particular come across as very soap opera to an extent that I didn’t believe them, which in turn made it difficult for me to suspend belief. I did believe in Lila’s search for community and I liked the fact that Waites shows how even though she wants love, she’s under no illusions as to her feelings about the weak-willed Kai and knows what she wants from him. However I struggled with how unworldly she is for someone who’s been on her own, especially when she’s forced to live with a group of young men who are involved in drug dealing. Equally while I could understand why Tom likes the quiet of St Petroc, I didn’t believe in his relationship with the needy Rachel while his use of therapist Janet seems a bit tacked on.
The plot is heavily reliant on contrivance to move forward, from Lila’s very obvious inquiries into what’s happening with Kyle Tanner to Tom’s equally obvious investigation of Noah and his community. I also found the final reveal of the Morrigan’s identity to be disappointing, not least because they’re revealed as being a stereotypical nutter, which I just don’t find particularly interesting.
In a Q&A with Waites at the end of the book he says that he’s writing a sequel which will see Tom in a prison. I can’t say that I would rush to read that on the basis of this, but it wouldn’t be a hard no from me either.
The Verdict:
Martyn Waites’s novel (the first in a series) marries thriller and folk horror but because there’s so much going on it’s less than the sum of its parts. It has good pacing and there are some creepy moments, but the plot is heavily contrived at times and neither Tom nor Lila quite convince as characters while the antagonist is similarly underdeveloped. It’s not a bad book, I kept turning the pages, but it wasn’t as satisfying a read as I’d hoped.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
The Cornish village of St Petroc is the sort of place where people come to hide. Tom Kilgannon is one such person. An ex-undercover cop, Tom is in the Witness Protection Programme hiding from some very violent people, and St Petroc’s offers him a chance to lice a safe and anonymous life.
Lila is a seventeen-year-old runaway. When she breaks into Tom’s house she takes more than just his money. His wallet holds everything about his new identity. He also knows that Lila is in danger from the travellers’ commune she’s been living in. Something sinister has been going on there and Lila knows more than she realises.
Tom Kilgannon is a former soldier from Middlesborough who now works as a barman in the sleepy town of St Petroc in Northern Cornwall. St Petroc is a forgotten and dying place, ignored by tourists and dependent on fishing, which has been hit since the Brexit vote. Its best chance of survival is a bid it has made for central government funds to redevelop the marina, but it’s up against better known areas and privately, Tom doesn’t really rate its chances.
Not that Tom wants St Petroc to win because Tom Kilgannon is not his real name - it’s the identity he assumed when he entered Witness Protection after something went wrong when he was working as an undercover police officer - and the last thing he wants is more people visiting St Petroc because it increases the risk of someone recognising him and blowing his cover. The only people who know Tom’s real identity are Janet, the therapist he is seeing to help him deal with the fall out from his time as an undercover officer, and PC Rachel Bellfair, his liaison officer with whom he has been having an ill judged affair.
But everything changes when he comes home from his shift in the pub to find that 17-year-old Lila has broken into his home, looking for shelter and something to eat. Lila ran away from home a couple of years ago and has been living in a commune close to St Petroc with her boyfriend Kai. The commune is led by Noah who rules with an iron fist - anyone who disagrees with his rules disappears, their bodies turning up in the sea weeks later. Lila knows that Noah was involved in the disappearance of university student Kyle Tanner because she helped to kidnap him but now she’s having second thoughts and she knows that Noah will try to silence her for good. Before she can tell the whole story to Ben, they’re interrupted by a visit from Rachel and by the time Tom gets rid of her, Lila has disappeared taking Tom’s coat - which contains his undercover ID documents - with her.
Anxious to get his ID back, Tom decides to search for her but as he does so, he realises that there’s something else going on in St Petroc. Something sinister. Something deadly. Something that makes him question everything he thought he knew about the town and its inhabitants …
Martyn Waites’s novel (the first in a series) marries thriller and folk horror but because there’s so much going on it’s less than the sum of its parts. It has good pacing and there are some creepy moments, but the plot is heavily contrived at times and neither Tom nor Lila quite convince as characters while the antagonist is similarly underdeveloped. It’s not a bad book, I kept turning the pages, but it wasn’t as satisfying a read as I’d hoped.
I picked this up because I was intrigued by the back cover copy and I’m a bit of a sucker for reads with a folk horror, THE WICKER MAN vibe to it. Waites has published other crime thrillers under the pseudonym Tania Carver, but I hadn’t read them.
To be fair to Waites, the folk horror elements work fairly well in the book. There’s a genuinely chilling quality to the scenes where the Morrigan visits a number of St Petroc residents and I liked the way Waites keeps open whether what happens to them is genuinely due to the Morrigan’s powers and the use of the old religion or whether it is all coincidental. Equally chilling are the scenes towards the end of the book where the extent of the Morrigan’s power and influence are revealed and a scene involving one of the bar flys who drink at the pub where Tom works gets under your skin in a flesh crawling way.
The problem is that as Waites says in an author note at the back that he threw everything into it - folk horror, crime, Brexit - and it shows. There is a lot going on here from Tom’s background as an undercover cop to Lila’s background as an abused teen, county lines gangs, cuckooing, the impact of Brexit on rural communities, power, control, and paganism. I think it’s too much for one book and I would have preferred it had some of the themes been pared back.
Tom and Lila’s backgrounds in particular come across as very soap opera to an extent that I didn’t believe them, which in turn made it difficult for me to suspend belief. I did believe in Lila’s search for community and I liked the fact that Waites shows how even though she wants love, she’s under no illusions as to her feelings about the weak-willed Kai and knows what she wants from him. However I struggled with how unworldly she is for someone who’s been on her own, especially when she’s forced to live with a group of young men who are involved in drug dealing. Equally while I could understand why Tom likes the quiet of St Petroc, I didn’t believe in his relationship with the needy Rachel while his use of therapist Janet seems a bit tacked on.
The plot is heavily reliant on contrivance to move forward, from Lila’s very obvious inquiries into what’s happening with Kyle Tanner to Tom’s equally obvious investigation of Noah and his community. I also found the final reveal of the Morrigan’s identity to be disappointing, not least because they’re revealed as being a stereotypical nutter, which I just don’t find particularly interesting.
In a Q&A with Waites at the end of the book he says that he’s writing a sequel which will see Tom in a prison. I can’t say that I would rush to read that on the basis of this, but it wouldn’t be a hard no from me either.
The Verdict:
Martyn Waites’s novel (the first in a series) marries thriller and folk horror but because there’s so much going on it’s less than the sum of its parts. It has good pacing and there are some creepy moments, but the plot is heavily contrived at times and neither Tom nor Lila quite convince as characters while the antagonist is similarly underdeveloped. It’s not a bad book, I kept turning the pages, but it wasn’t as satisfying a read as I’d hoped.
Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.
