Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3989 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-02
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Synopsis
A lonely woman of 53 never returns from a morning run - hidden in her cupboard is an expensive pair of cuff-links with a note: 'To You, with all possible love from your devoted, Me'. A girl vanishes in the dusk - is it to do with her teenage crush on Dava, the blue-eyed ' therapist' whose speciality is 'inner harmony'? Experienced policemen know that most missing persons either turn up or go missing on purpose. But fresh-faced DS Freya Gresham won't drop it - what could possibly link the people who disappear on 'The Hill', young and old, men and women, even a little dog? In "Various Haunts of Men", Susan Hill has created an absolutely convincing small cathedral town (within the orbit of a large urban city). She has peopled it with 'real' characters - the husband-and-wife GPs, the exceedingly dodgy surgeon, the grieving widow who is helped through the ritual of Christmas by her kindly neighbour, the down-to-earth flatmate ...and the tall blond police officer, Simon, who stands at the centre of an ordinary world in which gruesome things go on in lock-up garages.

From the Publisher
A new departure by one of our most accomplished fiction writers. This is the first of a series of three crime novels featuring the English policeman Simon Serrailler. It has 'popular' and 'bestseller' written all over it.

About the Author
Susan Hill has won both the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham Awards and been shortlisted for the Booker. She is the subject of one of the Vintage Living Texts. She runs her own publishing business, Longbarn Books, and edited the literary magazine, Books and Company. Her novels are set for GCSE and A Level, and her play, The Woman in Black, has been running in London's West End for 15 years.

Customer Reviews

Disappointing
Having read "Strange Meeting" and "In the springtime of the year", I was a Susan Hill fan looking forward to her usual high standard. The story took a long time to get going with a lot of pointless information being given about characters - does the reader really want to know the detailed contents of a minor charcater's fridge and what he was planning to have for tea, when it has no bearing on the story whatsoever? The main problem for me was lack of conflict - the main charcter seemed to get on famously with just about everyone and there was very little conflict elsewhere to drive the story forward and make it interesting. As a whodunnit, the killer is revealed about 150 pages before the end and I had already guessed their identity about 100 pages before that. The story just doesn't grab and I found myself skimming large chunks of pointless information. There were also a few areas of the story which didn't ring true - A senior partner of a doctors general practice who has never heard of psychic surgery?
Overall too long, dull and very disappointing.

Cop-out , in 2 senses
I was really loving this clever, pacy book. Susan Hill is an experienced novelist, and knows how to hold her readers' attention. But I agree with many others - the ending was a disaster. I felt cheated and disappointed, and like another of your reviewers, tempted to throw the book at the wall. It was almost as though Ms. Hill had suddenly tired of the whole process, and decided to wrap it up as quickly as possible (although she'd had over 500 pages in which to steer the novel to a more satisfaying ending). This was an awful shame, given the quality of the rest of the novel. It was heading for four or even five stars, but in the end I couldn't give it more than 3. But I shall read the sequel, and hope for better things.

enjoyable to read but disappointing ending
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and was intrigued to find out where the plot was going. However, in this I was sorely disappointed; it just wasn't worth reading at the end. I'm sure someone of Susan Hill's talent could have done much better than this. Also I don't want to ruin the book for anybody but the final victim was, in my opinion, a very unsatisfactory way to end a book. The character of Simon was dull and uninspiring and his sister was just too goody-goody. I also didn't understand what happened to all the alternative therapists eg the psychic surgeon. Very disappointing but funnily enough I did enjoy the reading process.