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The Beast of Bethulia Park
When Ray Parker dies unexpectedly in Bethulia Park Hospital, his suspicious family launch a campaign for justice. They recruit the young and idealistic hospital chaplain Father Calvin Baines to find a beautiful nurse who might unmask the doctor they believe is guilty of murder. When Emerald Essien enters his life, the priest finds his high principles are put to the test in a way that drives him to the edge of despair as he is propelled into a dark world of sexual obsession, danger and death ...
- GenresFiction
432 pages, Paperback
Published September 30, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 5, 2023
This is the best book I’ve read this year. It’s a very well crafted thriller with well written characters including a real beast of a villain (or 2). The novel starts and ends with a historical event that has certain echos in the main plot. The premise is quite disturbing - as it should be - given the scandal of some end of life care pathways and DNRs, but the religious references are ultimately, and naturally, redemptive. A great book.
July 18, 2023
This was an excellent read that was challenging subject matter but educational too, within the structure of a thriller that keeps you hooked from start to finish.
A real page turner and an ideal summer read, limited as that timescale is in the UK these days! Can’t wait to read any follow up, which surely should follow?!
A real page turner and an ideal summer read, limited as that timescale is in the UK these days! Can’t wait to read any follow up, which surely should follow?!
September 19, 2025
THE BEAST OF BETHULIA PARK is full of surprises – but not of the type you’d expect!
It’s a murder mystery, except that the murderers and murdered are declared from the start: the mysteries lie in how the murderers are fated.
It’s a detective story, but the police are busier detecting whistleblowers than criminals.
It’s a story of amateur sleuths, except that the sleuths don’t know how to bring the criminals to justice, without being criminalized in the process.
It’s a romance, where one party is a priest navigating love and celibacy, and the other party is a widow navigating past vices and rediscovered virtues.
It’s a drama of investigative journalism, except the journalist is waylaid by her internal investigation of herself.
It’s a spiritual journey, except that the classic dilemmas of faith versus doubt, and morality versus sin, are resolved in ambiguous and agnostic ways.
It’s a political drama, which exposes many of the issues that plague Britain today: unaccountable public services, professions acting like guilds, poor healthcare masquerading as best in the world, elite conspiracies and cover-ups, sham inquiries, loneliness, dysfunctional relationships, addictions, elder abuse, and assisted suicide,
So many genres, so many well-worn plots.
How is a new author to surprise the reader? Simon Caldwell lures you into presumptions and conventions, which he later shatters.
From the start, one is given the impression that Father Calvin Baines will be your hero, taking advantage of clerical privileges to solve crimes. He’s young, handsome, and athletic, like ‘Sidney Chambers’ in ‘Grantchester.’ He’s committed to his vows. Surely this is the ascetic to navigate the distractions that defeat other detectives?
Not quite. Baines is one of three necessary amateur sleuths, supplying each other with information and encouragement, but also betrayals and independence. Baines himself is self-interested and conflicted. From the start, he’s self-mortifying, to atone for noticing ‘the curves of young women in the street.’
Even while he volunteers at a local hospital, sees suspicious deaths, and is warned of the hospital’s unnaturally high death rate, he still needs to be told ‘to open your eyes’ and ‘to do something.’
He’s also constrained by a clerical chain of command. He is soon suspended from the hospital and his parish when implicated in a leak. So as to avoid more controversy, he keeps quiet when the doctor confronts him: the doctor bets that ‘he’s got a houseful of eight-year-old boys,’ promises to hasten the death of his ailing housekeeping, and beats him up.
Baines teams up with a nurse promising inside information, except she’s so attractive that even brambles wrapped around his thigh don’t prevent suggestive dreams. At one point, a Jesuit warns Baines that a demon might be driving ‘obsession.’
The nurse cares to expose the murderers, but is also punishing the doctor who exploited her sexually. Yet she isn’t above exploiting the doctor and implicating the priest in the leak, to protect herself. And she isn’t above standing by while the doctor abuses the priest.
The priest senses Emerald’s vicious side when he imagines her as the biblical Judith, who beheaded the General tormenting the Israelites. Still, she genuinely pursues their partnership – in crime-solving and in love. They make a good team.
Yet even the priest and the nurse are not sufficient sleuths. They need a journalist to bring public attention – in order to bring police attention.
The chapters focusing on the journalist’s perceptions are written in the first-person, like a journal. Jenny is the only character so honored. Naturally, the reader should think that the journalist is now the sufficient detective. But upon reading the police report, and the hospital’s report, and meeting the charming doctor, she accepts that the nurse is a vindictive liar. She even sleeps with the doctor, even though he is married and she is engaged.
Oh dear! Now the reader realizes that everyone is flawed, and that justice might not be delivered by anyone.
And yet flaws are neither entirely condemned nor rehabilitated. The nurse and the journalist are unfaithful, but their partners spend too much time with electronic devices, video games, alcohol, and television.
Lest readers were to imagine that the journalist fully atones for her adultery, she reveals, in a later first-person narrative, that she doesn’t care whether her fiancé cheats on her. For a while she lets him get more excited about the pregnancy: ‘Better than the sullen and sometimes selfish man I resented.’ She ends up taking him out to dinner, to tell him another man fathered the fetus, that their weak relationship is the cause, and now it is over.
Everyone is exploring what they can get away with. Doctors are death-hurriers or propagandists. Nurses are lazy. Police are shallow. Journalists sensationalize. Politicians spin. Bishops prefer priests who don’t make waves.
The novel isn’t firm on blame. Self-interests drive sin. Sin begets sin. Rule-breaking can be solved by only rule-breaking. One party’s inadequacies justify the other’s. Private citizens act uncharacteristically as institutions fail them.
Vengeance becomes the solution. Harmers are forced to experience the same harm. Criminality is solved with crime. Nothing else seems adequate, once the police, the hospital, and even the church prove inadequate..
Faithlessness is an issue, but, surprisingly, Catholicism is not a sufficient solution.
Only the priest seems to settle personal issues, and even his settlement appears to be a compromise of uncertain prospect. He admits love to the nurse, but takes her on as housekeeper, on promise of ‘perfect moderation’ rather than ‘complete abstinence’ – even though he had earlier doubted the sustainability of ‘perfect moderation.’
Emerald remains a lapsed Catholic, and a voice of reason. Earlier in the novel, she reminds him that ‘sometimes people who say they are Catholic do bad things too.’
In the end, the novel is less of a conflict between religion and secularism, more a conflict between traditional values and progressive politics. The murderous doctor is described by a peer as ‘enlightened or progressive.’ Meanwhile, a journalist who tips off the doctor to an investigation describes the investigation as a ‘fascist conspiracy.’
Thanks to Caldwell’s experience as a journalist investigating medical malpractice, the reader learns shocking insights into how political ideology and public institutions incentivize vicious outcomes. Authorities reward empty beds, less patient-time in hospital, cheaper treatments, even quicker deaths. The murderers’ motivations are to shorten the lives of ‘drains’ on the NHS, to protect the NHS, to encourage do-not-resuscitate orders, to assist suicide, to play God, to ‘feel powerful.’
The male doctor is not the only murderer. His female equivalent (also one of his lovers) brags that “Government actually paid me to help to increase the numbers of patients dying on end-of-life pathways.’ She’s married to the Detective Inspector who is investigating the murders. He is easily disinformed with medical jargon, flattered by fellow elitists, and diverted by golf.
One learns how easily patients are killed in the NHS – what the novel calls ‘the dark art of the involuntary euthanasia.’ Patients are under-supplied with water and food, doped on drugs, left unattended, written off with diagnoses that are not inherently fatal, sickened with drugs contra-indicated for their prior conditions, and eventually put on palliative ‘pathways’ – so that sustenance can (administratively speaking) be withdrawn, and soporifics increased.
Administrative teams give the doctor cover, by seconding the doctor’s decisions as if the decisions are collective. The doctor gives himself peer-to-peer cover by being genuinely hard-fighting for the lives of younger patients. And the doctor ameliorates the disappointments of the patient’s family by blaming disappointments on ‘miscommunication’ and lay ‘expectations.’
THE BEAST OF BETHULIA PARK is a rich, thoughtful, multi-genre novel, of increasing topicality, as British institutions and society continue to collapse into distrust, division, recrimination, and lawlessness.
It’s a murder mystery, except that the murderers and murdered are declared from the start: the mysteries lie in how the murderers are fated.
It’s a detective story, but the police are busier detecting whistleblowers than criminals.
It’s a story of amateur sleuths, except that the sleuths don’t know how to bring the criminals to justice, without being criminalized in the process.
It’s a romance, where one party is a priest navigating love and celibacy, and the other party is a widow navigating past vices and rediscovered virtues.
It’s a drama of investigative journalism, except the journalist is waylaid by her internal investigation of herself.
It’s a spiritual journey, except that the classic dilemmas of faith versus doubt, and morality versus sin, are resolved in ambiguous and agnostic ways.
It’s a political drama, which exposes many of the issues that plague Britain today: unaccountable public services, professions acting like guilds, poor healthcare masquerading as best in the world, elite conspiracies and cover-ups, sham inquiries, loneliness, dysfunctional relationships, addictions, elder abuse, and assisted suicide,
So many genres, so many well-worn plots.
How is a new author to surprise the reader? Simon Caldwell lures you into presumptions and conventions, which he later shatters.
From the start, one is given the impression that Father Calvin Baines will be your hero, taking advantage of clerical privileges to solve crimes. He’s young, handsome, and athletic, like ‘Sidney Chambers’ in ‘Grantchester.’ He’s committed to his vows. Surely this is the ascetic to navigate the distractions that defeat other detectives?
Not quite. Baines is one of three necessary amateur sleuths, supplying each other with information and encouragement, but also betrayals and independence. Baines himself is self-interested and conflicted. From the start, he’s self-mortifying, to atone for noticing ‘the curves of young women in the street.’
Even while he volunteers at a local hospital, sees suspicious deaths, and is warned of the hospital’s unnaturally high death rate, he still needs to be told ‘to open your eyes’ and ‘to do something.’
He’s also constrained by a clerical chain of command. He is soon suspended from the hospital and his parish when implicated in a leak. So as to avoid more controversy, he keeps quiet when the doctor confronts him: the doctor bets that ‘he’s got a houseful of eight-year-old boys,’ promises to hasten the death of his ailing housekeeping, and beats him up.
Baines teams up with a nurse promising inside information, except she’s so attractive that even brambles wrapped around his thigh don’t prevent suggestive dreams. At one point, a Jesuit warns Baines that a demon might be driving ‘obsession.’
The nurse cares to expose the murderers, but is also punishing the doctor who exploited her sexually. Yet she isn’t above exploiting the doctor and implicating the priest in the leak, to protect herself. And she isn’t above standing by while the doctor abuses the priest.
The priest senses Emerald’s vicious side when he imagines her as the biblical Judith, who beheaded the General tormenting the Israelites. Still, she genuinely pursues their partnership – in crime-solving and in love. They make a good team.
Yet even the priest and the nurse are not sufficient sleuths. They need a journalist to bring public attention – in order to bring police attention.
The chapters focusing on the journalist’s perceptions are written in the first-person, like a journal. Jenny is the only character so honored. Naturally, the reader should think that the journalist is now the sufficient detective. But upon reading the police report, and the hospital’s report, and meeting the charming doctor, she accepts that the nurse is a vindictive liar. She even sleeps with the doctor, even though he is married and she is engaged.
Oh dear! Now the reader realizes that everyone is flawed, and that justice might not be delivered by anyone.
And yet flaws are neither entirely condemned nor rehabilitated. The nurse and the journalist are unfaithful, but their partners spend too much time with electronic devices, video games, alcohol, and television.
Lest readers were to imagine that the journalist fully atones for her adultery, she reveals, in a later first-person narrative, that she doesn’t care whether her fiancé cheats on her. For a while she lets him get more excited about the pregnancy: ‘Better than the sullen and sometimes selfish man I resented.’ She ends up taking him out to dinner, to tell him another man fathered the fetus, that their weak relationship is the cause, and now it is over.
Everyone is exploring what they can get away with. Doctors are death-hurriers or propagandists. Nurses are lazy. Police are shallow. Journalists sensationalize. Politicians spin. Bishops prefer priests who don’t make waves.
The novel isn’t firm on blame. Self-interests drive sin. Sin begets sin. Rule-breaking can be solved by only rule-breaking. One party’s inadequacies justify the other’s. Private citizens act uncharacteristically as institutions fail them.
Vengeance becomes the solution. Harmers are forced to experience the same harm. Criminality is solved with crime. Nothing else seems adequate, once the police, the hospital, and even the church prove inadequate..
Faithlessness is an issue, but, surprisingly, Catholicism is not a sufficient solution.
Only the priest seems to settle personal issues, and even his settlement appears to be a compromise of uncertain prospect. He admits love to the nurse, but takes her on as housekeeper, on promise of ‘perfect moderation’ rather than ‘complete abstinence’ – even though he had earlier doubted the sustainability of ‘perfect moderation.’
Emerald remains a lapsed Catholic, and a voice of reason. Earlier in the novel, she reminds him that ‘sometimes people who say they are Catholic do bad things too.’
In the end, the novel is less of a conflict between religion and secularism, more a conflict between traditional values and progressive politics. The murderous doctor is described by a peer as ‘enlightened or progressive.’ Meanwhile, a journalist who tips off the doctor to an investigation describes the investigation as a ‘fascist conspiracy.’
Thanks to Caldwell’s experience as a journalist investigating medical malpractice, the reader learns shocking insights into how political ideology and public institutions incentivize vicious outcomes. Authorities reward empty beds, less patient-time in hospital, cheaper treatments, even quicker deaths. The murderers’ motivations are to shorten the lives of ‘drains’ on the NHS, to protect the NHS, to encourage do-not-resuscitate orders, to assist suicide, to play God, to ‘feel powerful.’
The male doctor is not the only murderer. His female equivalent (also one of his lovers) brags that “Government actually paid me to help to increase the numbers of patients dying on end-of-life pathways.’ She’s married to the Detective Inspector who is investigating the murders. He is easily disinformed with medical jargon, flattered by fellow elitists, and diverted by golf.
One learns how easily patients are killed in the NHS – what the novel calls ‘the dark art of the involuntary euthanasia.’ Patients are under-supplied with water and food, doped on drugs, left unattended, written off with diagnoses that are not inherently fatal, sickened with drugs contra-indicated for their prior conditions, and eventually put on palliative ‘pathways’ – so that sustenance can (administratively speaking) be withdrawn, and soporifics increased.
Administrative teams give the doctor cover, by seconding the doctor’s decisions as if the decisions are collective. The doctor gives himself peer-to-peer cover by being genuinely hard-fighting for the lives of younger patients. And the doctor ameliorates the disappointments of the patient’s family by blaming disappointments on ‘miscommunication’ and lay ‘expectations.’
THE BEAST OF BETHULIA PARK is a rich, thoughtful, multi-genre novel, of increasing topicality, as British institutions and society continue to collapse into distrust, division, recrimination, and lawlessness.
July 25, 2025
Real life doesn’t imitate art. In real life, stories get cut off half way through, or sometimes hardly begin at all. Others seem to drag on for far too long. The reason for this is that ‘real life’ only tells part of the story. It’s like reading a book but not being able to read to the end, although exactly how far into the story you can go is random; sometimes a long way, on other occasions to half way, sometimes just a few pages.
This is why, to make art, particularly in the written form of stories, we have to change ‘real life’, we have to tell the whole story so that we, as writers, can create a coherent work of art. We have to ensure that all the story occurs within the confines of the story on the page. But, again, real life isn’t like that.
If it ends at death, then the stories we tell ourselves are just that, polite fictions coined to paper over the bleak reality that there are no stories, that the coherence and the meaning we create with them are of less import than a passing dream that wakes us briefly before we collapse back into the night.
If the story continues after death, then our stories of this world do have meaning, for they acknowledge the incompleteness of our normal human stories by completing them in this world whereas in most cases, the stories are completed only later, their meaning made clear and their climax reached.
In The Beast of Bethulia Park, Simon Caldwell tells a story of this life with reference to the later life, and leaves the events of this life unfulfilled. As such, it’s a story true to the real nature of things but, in one sense, it does not work completely as a narrative because its denoument is, ultimately, off the page of time and beyond the ability of any writer to convey. But in another sense, it does work remarkably well as a story, embodied in time but directed towards the consummation of time.
It’s also a fascinating thriller about doctors with a belief that they alone can deliver life and death – a belief that the current passage of the Assisted Dying Bill throws into an all too believable light.
This is why, to make art, particularly in the written form of stories, we have to change ‘real life’, we have to tell the whole story so that we, as writers, can create a coherent work of art. We have to ensure that all the story occurs within the confines of the story on the page. But, again, real life isn’t like that.
If it ends at death, then the stories we tell ourselves are just that, polite fictions coined to paper over the bleak reality that there are no stories, that the coherence and the meaning we create with them are of less import than a passing dream that wakes us briefly before we collapse back into the night.
If the story continues after death, then our stories of this world do have meaning, for they acknowledge the incompleteness of our normal human stories by completing them in this world whereas in most cases, the stories are completed only later, their meaning made clear and their climax reached.
In The Beast of Bethulia Park, Simon Caldwell tells a story of this life with reference to the later life, and leaves the events of this life unfulfilled. As such, it’s a story true to the real nature of things but, in one sense, it does not work completely as a narrative because its denoument is, ultimately, off the page of time and beyond the ability of any writer to convey. But in another sense, it does work remarkably well as a story, embodied in time but directed towards the consummation of time.
It’s also a fascinating thriller about doctors with a belief that they alone can deliver life and death – a belief that the current passage of the Assisted Dying Bill throws into an all too believable light.
March 16, 2024
I really enjoyed the narrative, but felt that the ending left a few openings for another story with some of the characters.
We begin in the time where Roman Catholicism has been outlawed, and the priests are dispatched with impunity. We read of a priest whose remains are returned to his local squire, and buried, as opposed to being put on show.
Moving forward to the book's present day, a young priest attends an inquest, and is asked by the victim's family to investigate the death. He agrees, little knowing of the troubles to come. Father Calvin becomes a hospital chaplain in Bethulia Park Hospital, where it seems that a lot of elderly patients go in for minor illnesses, but end up dying. Why?
Father Calvin begins his investigation, but whoever he speaks to seem to be deflecting his queries and he fails in his task.
One or two main characters believe in what the priest is trying to do. Several families of the deceased patients are also backing his investigation. The police, though, are not interested, because often older people will die. There's no evidence to prove that a member of the medical staff is killing these poor people.
Father Calvin is suspended and goes on Retreat in London. Here he is counselled by a Jesuit Priest, who advises Calvin to do some research in Holywell, where St. Winifred lived, died and was buried. During his research, Calvin receives help from an interesting character. Along with the families and a journalist, the investigation reaches a climax. The reader finds out exactly who the perpetrator is, and the hospital returns to being a place of healing, not a place of killing.
Father Calvin is now back in the Parish as their priest, the lives of those involved on both sides of the divide move on, and all seem to have changed in significant ways.
We begin in the time where Roman Catholicism has been outlawed, and the priests are dispatched with impunity. We read of a priest whose remains are returned to his local squire, and buried, as opposed to being put on show.
Moving forward to the book's present day, a young priest attends an inquest, and is asked by the victim's family to investigate the death. He agrees, little knowing of the troubles to come. Father Calvin becomes a hospital chaplain in Bethulia Park Hospital, where it seems that a lot of elderly patients go in for minor illnesses, but end up dying. Why?
Father Calvin begins his investigation, but whoever he speaks to seem to be deflecting his queries and he fails in his task.
One or two main characters believe in what the priest is trying to do. Several families of the deceased patients are also backing his investigation. The police, though, are not interested, because often older people will die. There's no evidence to prove that a member of the medical staff is killing these poor people.
Father Calvin is suspended and goes on Retreat in London. Here he is counselled by a Jesuit Priest, who advises Calvin to do some research in Holywell, where St. Winifred lived, died and was buried. During his research, Calvin receives help from an interesting character. Along with the families and a journalist, the investigation reaches a climax. The reader finds out exactly who the perpetrator is, and the hospital returns to being a place of healing, not a place of killing.
Father Calvin is now back in the Parish as their priest, the lives of those involved on both sides of the divide move on, and all seem to have changed in significant ways.
July 21, 2023
This thriller was an ambitious debut novel, in which Caldwell encompasses all of human drama - murder, betrayal, adultery, end-of-life issues, justice, forgiveness, love, lust, and redemption - in great detail. Told mainly through the eyes and experience of the protagonist priest, Fr Calvin Baines, the story deeply incorporates many contemporary Catholic themes and issues, both directly and indirectly.
While there were parts where the narrative lagged somewhat, and some of the dialogue could've been tightened, the tension remained consistent throughout. Caldwell has a keen eye for detail, and his characters were written with depth and personality.
While there were parts where the narrative lagged somewhat, and some of the dialogue could've been tightened, the tension remained consistent throughout. Caldwell has a keen eye for detail, and his characters were written with depth and personality.
May 15, 2025
This novel took me to all parts of the wide spectrum of emotions and dilemmas which make us human. The plot and characterisation are equally strong and well balanced, resulting in a story which is thought provoking, intelligent and sensitive. Through his portrayal of the two main female leads, Simon Caldwell conveys an uncanny understanding of the way that women think and navigate their way through life.
May 29, 2024
I really enjoyed reading this book. The characters are very interesting and the journey of Father Calvin Baines is definitely one of twists and turns. Emerald Essien is certainly an interesting character who is also very intriguing and unpredictable. I look forward to Simon's next book and love the fact that I can relate to many of the places within the book.
October 8, 2025
Gripping mix of questionable medical ethics, vulnerable and reckless characters set in the best place in the world (north west England), and sprinkled with the exotic character surnames of Essien and Klein.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews