The Last Directive

''What a hell of a way to start a vacation,'' is the way Father Ted Caldwell, an Episcopal priest, put it after falling over a corpse in a graveyard. But that was only the beginning. Father Ted, vacationing in England with his Aunt Kate, who works for a mysterious British government agency known vaguely as ''the department,'' soon finds out there's more than meets the eye in the remote coastal Norfolk village Little-Wickham-by-the-Sea.

First the lines of division among the village population are unusual, to say the least. This somewhat feudal arrangement consists of what Father Ted calls the establishment, Sir William and his cronies; the submissive native villagers, well taken care of by the baronet; and young urban professionals who are apparently too busy with their own lives and affairs to question the strange events taking place in Little Wickham.

What catches the priest's attention is an apparent attempt by the establishment to cover up what seems to be a murder and the reluctance of the police to intervene. As he probes further, he discovers a village history that extends all the way back to the Second World War.

Added to this mix is Kate's seeming involvement and her ambivalent attitude as Ted begins his own investigation. Inevitably as Kate predicts, Father Ted finds himself getting in too deep and finds his own life at risk. He is abducted and, with the help of the local postmistress and Kate, escapes only to stumble ever deeper into the morass that lies at the bottom of the village's life.