Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
On yet another unrelated note (everything in this book was unrelated) a rich 56 year old moves to town with his sexy 22 year old wife, buys a stately house, gives a million pounds to Simon's mom's charity to fund a respite day care for those caring for the elderly and the wife wants Karin to help her with her gardens. Uh huh. My first book by his author and I loved it. Simon Serrailler has a lot in common with Adam Dalgleish, who I always admire, so it was probably a foregone conclusion that this would meet my approval too.
First, I didn't find the murder mystery in the book to be as strong as they usually are. It was relatively easy to figure out who was behind the murders early on. Essentially, what happens is that the police make absolutely no progress whatsoever. Meanwhile, we are offered monologues from the kidnapped boy. And then the boy dies. I mean, the book suddenly shoots through with realism. Sometimes criminals are not caught. I guess that's the moral here. Well, I wasn't expecting something THAT depressing. Can it be True?; (illustrated by Angela Barrett) Hamish Hamilton 1987; Puffin 1988; Walker Books 1990A Question of Identity opens with an italicized paragraph that hints at a dark mind and darker things to come....deliciously creepy. In this installment of the Simon Serailler murder mystery series, Simon is confronted with a killer of old ladies. Little old ladies. Nice old ladies. Because nobody is safe in Susan Hill’s world.
This is an intriguing premise, all too believable. As ever with Hill’s novels, this is efficient and chilling. She introduces us to prospective villains, each seems a little questionable: but are we being unfair, reading something into signs that don’t exist, generalising, making assumptions? In parallel with the introduction of prospective villains, we are also shown prospective victims. This second novel in the Simon Serrailler series is more loosely written than the first, a trend that continues through the other books I’ve read in this series. The police procedural—in this instance a case of child abduction—proceeds alongside the lives of the Serrailler/Deerbon families, a bit like flipping between a soap opera and a detective mystery on TV. In addition, Hill starts using a technique she often employs later, that of introducing a seemingly unrelated subplot that you can easily guess is going to tie into the mystery at some point. I’d read the next novel as a standalone a few years ago, so I knew the biggest reveal, but I still enjoyed listening to the story unfold in Steven Pacey’s well-paced narration. MY THOUGHTS: I am fond of the Serrailler family, with perhaps the exception of Simon and Cat's father. Each new installment in this series is like visiting with old friends. Simon is still on his own but getting restless, not with his police work but with his personal life. Cat is as busy as ever, and as conscientious as ever. Familywise, things seem to be chugging along quite peacefully. But of course, it can't last. Hill revisits old characters from her previous outing, The Betrayal of Trust, but briefly. Jocelyn Forbes, the woman living with motor neurone disease, or MND, is still alive, but barely, and Hill seems to have a keen interest in MND and its debilitating affects on a person's body. Also, Rachel Wyatt and Simon Serrailler's rendezvous continues in the latest mystery, and though the relationship adds nothing to the meat of the main story, Hill creates interesting characters that her readers care about and hope to revisit in future stories.
Actually, I was more interested in the sub-plots and the minor characters. The 'hero' of this series is a complete non-event as a policeman. We find out he loves his mentally challenged sister, and that he likes painting. All fine, but he contributes absolutely nothing to the investigation. Sometimes it's a bit tiresome when the main character does EVERYTHING, but...
In 1975 she married Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells and they moved to Stratford upon Avon. Their first daughter, Jessica, was born in 1977 and their second daughter, Clemency, was born in 1985. Hill has recently founded her own publishing company, Long Barn Books, which has published one work of fiction per year. The primary driver of the book is a drugs network penetrating a town outside the major cities – the so called county lines. An apparent heroin overdose draws the police’s attention to the problem more forcibly, and we also get the stories of a two young people who are drawn into the network as couriers and their suffering as a result. In addition, the stories of Simon himself and his sister Cat continue to progress. Initial investigations discover that the mysterious "sign" left on the body was the calling card of a suspect who was charged with several murders in the northwest of the country, tried but acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence. All indications suggest that this person has simply vanished. Or is he right under their noses? Simon Serrailler is obliged to make delve deeper and scratch out answers,I found the book very hard to follow. There are a lot of characters and plot points I was expected to know from previous entries, I assume, and I had a hard time keeping them straight. Much of the plot had to do with the personal life of Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler and his family and I was just not invested enough to care. Second, Hill started many story lines and then did nothing with them. Now, I realize this is her typical writing style, BUT some of these had potential to add to the story and would have made the book so much stronger. For example, the book starts off with Keyes, the murderer, being found not guilty based on a technicality. The reader gets a glimpse into his wife's fear as a result of the verdict. She is terrified, has no idea what to do, and is rejected by her half-sister when she pleads to stay even one night. End of story until she is ready to die many years later. Then, her half-sister tries to seek out information regarding Keyes whereabouts since he has been assigned a new identity. Why would you want the man who your sister was terrified of to know she is dying? The answer in the book? Because he has a right to know...
This time, elderly ladies are being bumped off in a particularly nasty way in their own homes, in crimes that seem awfully similar to an earlier case in Yorkshire. Serrailler's problem is that the killer has apparently vanished, leaving no traces behind him. Something's definitely rotten in the state of Special Operations... Working in and around Lafferton, Serrailler works to get to the bottom of the case in these intricate and intelligent mystery stories. There is also talk of a television adaptation in what could potentially become a long-running series to rival that of previous popular shows such as Inspector Morse. This all builds towards Simon Serrailler becoming one of the best known fictional detectives, in a franchise that has plenty of life left in it yet. Simon Serrailler: The Various Haunts of Men
Publication Order of Simon Serrailler Books
The book opens with a court scene where a murderer manages to walk free due to some kind of legal mismanagement. He is unable to rejoin society as he would probably be lynched, so he is set up with an entirely new identity and moved to another town. Years later when the same kind of murders start again Simon and his team find themselves looking for a man who does not exist anymore. I like the mix of personal with professional lives that Hill writes so well. Neither overwhelms the other and they just blend seamlessly together. A lot is going on in the little town of Lafferton, England. There's a ring of car thieves, a lot of personal drama in the Serrailler family, and worst, a nine-year old boy is missing. It's assumed the boy has been taken while waiting outside his home for his school ride. This last incident has echoes all through the book as a series of characters go from blissful, almost carefree lives, to lives of absolute emotional and psychological hell. There were passages extremely difficult to read. Not for the graphic nature, but for the fact they were the thoughts and words of the kidnapped child. In fact, I often stopped reading after one of these passages, which were mercifully short, btw. This is listed as a mystery, but it's more of a domestic slice of life book about Simon and his family, and Brookie and his family, and Cat and all the DCs, and poor Mr Lionel, and the Chinese herbalist, and the junkie found dead of an OD/contaminated batch of heroin and a couple of animals and Olivia and whether Simon is going to get with Rachel and ugh. The quiet cathedral town of Lafferton undergoes an undergoes an unexpected turn of events as its usually tranquil environment is disturbed following the disappearance of a woman up on an area known as ‘the hill’. Although the vanishing of this woman is not suspicious in of itself, people tend disappear of their own accord all the time up there, it’s the mysterious turn of events that precede the vanishing act. A young girl followed by an older man and then even a dog all disappear from the top of the hill, leaving everyone with the suspicion that there is something else going on up there. Freya Graffham is the young policewoman that’s been assigned to case of investigating what it is that’s going on here, as she has only recently just joined the police-force and is looking to make her way in the department. With a compassionate and inquiring mind, she aims to solve her first case with conviction.
Great Deal 
New Comment