The strange events begin with the breathless tale of a mysterious light shining from inside the Minster. Added to reports of ghostly organ music and a piercing scream heard at the dead of night, and the Dean of the Minster has good reason to contact Reverend Septimus Treloar, once a Chief Inspector in the CID. A bad dream, he decides. But before long the mystery deepens with the rumoured return of the ghost of an eighteenth-century organist. Could he have come back from the dead to haunt the Minster? Or will Septimus be able to use his policeman's nous once more to find the villain at the root of it all?

Septimus and the Minster Ghost is the second of Stephen Chance's hugely popular Septimus detective mysteries. First published in 1972, it again combines echoes of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, with the author's own characteristic wit and eccentricity.