Old Bakery Books.co.uk

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 Publishers Weekly
Weaving together a variety of subtly interrelated narratives, British author Hill (Air and Angels) embeds a thoughtful reflection on alternative medicine into a taut and suspenseful mystery, the first of a new crime series featuring Chief Insp. Simon Serrailler. Having transferred to the small cathedral town of Lafferton from London's 'Met,' police detective Freya Graffham explores her new community and becomes fascinated by Serrailler, her enigmatic superior. Though she fits well within the local police force, she finds herself unable to let go what seems like a routine missing persons report on a middle-aged spinster. When yet more townspeople turn up missing, her hunch is verified and a serious police search begins, bringing her into closer proximity with Serrailler at the same time it exposes her to danger.

A dark but entirely convincing ending may startle some readers, but Hill's fine writing and nuanced insight into human nature should appeal to fans of such masters of the psychological thriller as P.D. James, Elizabeth George and Ruth Rendell, who provides a blurb.