Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19874 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-02
• Original language: English
• 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

Very disappointing
THE VARIOUS HAUNTS OF MEN (Pol. Proc-DS Freya Graffam-England-Cont) - NR
Hill, Susan - 1st in series
Chatto & Windus, 2004, UK Hardcover - ISBN: 185619714x

First Sentence: Last week I found a letter from you.

In a small English cathedral town, a 53-year-old single woman disappears while on her daily run on "The Hill." DS Freya Graffam searches the woman's cottage for clues and finds a hidden present; a pair of expensive cufflinks and a note saying "To You, with all possible love from your devoted, Me." It is surprising as no one knew the woman had been seeing any one. As Freya investigates, she also finds a number of other people who have disappeared from "The Hill" as well.

I was annoyed by this book almost from the first page. I felt drowned in a minutia of detail which had not real relevance to the plot. There are too many strands to the plot, many of which are just left hanging at the end.

Many of the characters begin as interesting but, again, fade off to nothing. This is supposed to be a "Simon Serrailler" book, but his presence in the story is negligible.

The subject of conventional versus non-conventional medicine could have been interesting but becomes rambling instead. The book is overlong and I lost interest about half-way through the book and skimmed from there on until toward the end.

I was underwhelmed by the killer's motive and annoyed to have the killer revealed significantly before the end of the book. The end of this book was one that moved it into the category of a wall-banger for me.

This book has been sitting on my shelf since 2004. I regret having wasted the time to read it and even more, wasted the money to buy it.

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.