It has been quite a while since I've read a Susan Howatch novel. She's a writer whose work I had stumbled upon by accident in a BORDERS bookstore a long time ago, some years before the advent of Kindle. I bought one of her novels from her Church of England series --- Absolute Truths, which examined the inner struggles of a respected, high ranking Anglican priest following the unexpected death in 1965 of his beloved wife who had long been his rock and ever faithful helpmate --- which I read and savored. This was a novel that had real, relatable characters in a story that was both compelling and intriguing. And so it was that I went on to read the other novels in the Church of England series. Howatch showed herself to be a writer with a sure touch for telling rich and well-crafted stories with complex characters whose own stories made for rewarding reading.

A Question of Integrity shows Howatch in top form. It's centered on a healing center in the City of London --- the Church of St. Benet's --- that is headed by an Anglican priest (Nicholas Darrow, who had figured prominently in one of the novels of the Church of England series) known for his psychic gifts and capacity for helping its parishioners and anyone else who entered the center in need of help and assistance.

One rainy day in March 1988, Alice Fletcher, a plain-looking, shy, dumpy woman in her 30s who has been caring for a dying, cantankerous aunt who had helped raised her, comes into London during her lunch break. She is stressed out, frustrated, and in despair following a pointless job interview earlier in the day with a personnel officer she had described as behaving like "a sadist." Alice is someone whose life had been one of unremitting struggle in which she felt herself unloved by the wider world. Only the support and guidance of her aunt -- a woman whose granite views of life and people, fueled her with a resoluteness that defined her character and approach to living --- who had taken on Alice after her parents abandoned her as a child, gave Alice a sense of purpose. Indeed, it was her aunt who helped get Alice into a culinary school, where she proved to be an apt pupil, and graduated to become a superb cook.

The rain came down in sheets. Alice, in seeking a place that could offer her some temporary relief from the elements, stumbled into a church and, in the process, "stumbles into a situation that will revolutionize her life. She discovers [in the Church of St. Benet] a modern but mysterious healing centre and is drawn inexorably into the lives of the people who work there."

The novel, as laid out by Howatch, is tightly structured, made up of stories as told by not only Alice, but also Nicholas Darrow, his wife (who comes across as glamorous and successful from having built up a thriving business, and reveals her growing frustration and unhappiness from a 20-year marriage in which she has been neglected by a husband wholly devoted to his priestly vocation), and the Reverend Lewis Hall, an "irascible traditionalist [a widower in his late 60s]" working with Nicholas at the healing center who is a bit of a misogynist, as well as a homophobe at odds with the liberal spirit then sweeping through the Church of England. Added to all this is Francie, a woman working at the healing center as a 'Befriender' (i.e. a layperson employed by the Church who is qualified and highly capable of meeting the needs of people who enter Reverend Darrow's church seeking a way of sorting out their lives and addressing their spiritual needs). Though on the surface Francie shows herself to be a superb Befriender, she is later revealed as someone with deep, unresolved needs and desires that causes a major shakeup affecting Darrow and the healing center itself throughout most of 1988.

I ABSOLUTELY SAVORED this novel, whose reading for me was like watching a richly textured and captivating PBS TV mystery drama from the UK.  Frankly, why A Question of Integrity was never, to the best of my knowledge, adapted for either the small or large screen, boggles the mind.