Susan Hill (1) (1942–)

The third and last in this series that I acquired recently, this is a little better. It is book 11, and ten years have passed since the opening volume. The deceased Freya is name checked yet again as Simon's sister, Dr Cat, wonders if Simon would have settled down with her had she lived, but concludes that he probably would soon have fallen out of love with her. He apparently has busted up with yet another woman, Rachel, though she was the first to share his flat for a brief period. However, he bumps into her and invites her out for coffee and is soon texting her to invite her to spend a long weekend with him, which Cat takes as yet another instance of his inability to relate to other people's feelings.

In common with previous volumes, a lot of ths is soap opera - among other inconsequential ramblings, the relationship of Cat's son Sam with his girlfriend. Some of the backstory dropped into this seems barely credible: the father of Simon and Cat, widowed in book 3, has apparently married again in the meantime but turned violent against his second wife and sexually assaulted another woman so is now on his own. Cat and her family spent a whole year in Australia, not the six months they originally planned at the end of book 3 and at some point in the intevening years, Cat's husband died of cancer. She is now remarried - her second husband being the Chief Constable and her brother's direct boss!

Another backstory element demonstrates the writer's departure from the reality of police work, something that happens too often in these books. Simon has a prosthetic arm though little is made of this, but it seems he was seriously injured while infiltrating a paedophile ring - as he was apparently a Detective Chief Superintendant by that time, I find that completely incredible. Even at his level in books 1 and 3 which I read previously, a Detective Chief Inspector, he would have been too senior in rank to work undercover, and his appearance on various previous TV press conferences etc would have meant far too much risk of his being recognised. And from a review I read after finishing the book, it seems this was in prison, so surely he would have stood even more chance of being recognised by one of the inmates.

The actual crime element in the present volume is the impact on the local community of county lines: drug dealing networks that exploit children to courier money and drugs. A boy of eleven is drawn in by a man who gives him a lift when he misses the school bus and then waits for him outside school with a present - a rucksack which turns out to contain a 'burner' phone. Through these 'gifts' the boy is pressured into making his first drop-off. Meanwhile, an older girl tries to refuse to carry on doing the same thing for the same dealer, cowed by threats of violence that lead to tragedy.

By the end of the book, Simon accepts that his cosy, convenient flat isn't a permanent home: it is revealed that it is only rented. Given his good salary, he should buy a house, and he considers one out in the countryside but in his usual way, dithers over whether to proceed. However, there are inklings that he is finally ready to commit to a relationship, and by story's end it seems he will get back with Rachel. Even marriage seems to be in the air, so this was a good point on which to bow out of this series. I don't intend to read any more, but at least the last two have gradually got a bit better, earning an extra star over the disastrous book 1, and I can award this one a respectable 3 stars.… (lisätietoja)

Having bought three of this series, not realising I had disliked book 1 under a different cover when read in 2019, I thought I'd better try the next - I don't have volume 2 but from a perusal of Goodreads reviews, it seems not a lot happens in it anyway. The missing child story pursued in the present volume begins in that book but is not resolved until this one.

Serrailler is drafted in by North Yorkshire CID to advise, as they also have had a boy go missing in their area. Then a girl is kidnapped, but this time there is a witness and more to go on. Meanwhile, various events occur to other characters who have links with Simon's sister Cat who is a local doctor, or are neighbours of the murderer.

Although this story wasn't so annoying as the first, it had several weaknesses. Without giving too much away, I found the identity of the murderer totally unconvincing. The author was forced to admit, in discussions between police characters, that this kind of crime is almost never committed by such a person and in the handful of real-life cases (which are name-checked), it was always as a co-criminal with the far more likely perpetrator. Secondly, there is nothing to explain why the character not only travelled to Yorkshire to continue the killing spree, but took all the bodies there to hide them. That is a glaring plot hole.

Other threads of the story remain unresolved. It's never made clear what happens to the murderer ultimately, or to the person's mother after she develops an unreasoning mania that her child couldn't possibly be guilty, and her luckless second husband who has great grounds for divorce in my opinion. Nor is the thread involving the neighbour and neighbour's child given any kind of closure. I'm not sure if the writer was trying to hint that the child would turn out like the murderer who she admired.

I didn't like the plethora of violence against women. Three different women are assaulted in the first few chapters, and in two cases the culprit is either never identified or else not until late in the book when it is accompanied by yet more extreme violence. The third woman misguidedly refuses to press charges despite the seriousness of the case, which leaves a seriously disturbed individual at large, free to murder a young mother. Oddly, despite her soul searching in a scene with Serrailler, the third woman shows no remorse at the fact that if she had only gone through with charging the culprit, he wouldn't have been at large to attack yet another woman. I believe UK police can proceed with charges without the victim's consent, although it makes prosecution more problematic especially if the victim is a hostile witness. But the fact that the individual concerned was a danger to the public and mentally unbalanced should surely have been grounds to either charge him or section him under mental health legislation.

Serrailler mopes around in this book, brooding on the death of the protagonist of book one, whom he took little notice of at the time apart from inappropriately inviting her to dinner (given that she was his subordinate two ranks below him). It seems that in book 2, Diana, a businesswoman with whom he had an 'arrangement' for years, suddenly fell for him obsessively to the point of stalking him. Yet when he meets her again in London, he is sure she will be happy to resume their former relationship of convenience, and ends up in bed with her, demonstrating yet again his total immaturity, cluelessness about how other people feel, and lack of ethics. He then spends the rest of the book avoiding her.

He later latches onto another female character for no good reason and, after getting a good talking to by Cat about his awful behaviour towards women, is rebuffed by the object of his desire. This should make him realise his behaviour is unacceptable, but having started the third of the books I acquired, I can see that the lesson is only superficial and temporary. Apart from his drawing side-line and unredeemedly bad treatment of women, he is introverted and a bland character. His subordinate Nathan, now a sergeant, is the only light relief in the book, as in volume one. By the end of the book, all sorts of relationships are breaking up, including family ones, leaving things more open perhaps for growth. Altogether I would rate this as an OK 2 stars.… (lisätietoja)

This is one I struggle to rate (I'm struggling to rate a lot lately - often 3 feels unfair with something I've enjoyed, but if I stick to many into 4 I can't distinguish between just *how* good something is as much - oh well). 4 in the end because I think it is a very effective story - it's a pastiche of a certain idea of a Victorian ghost story, but it's written really well, with constant ratcheting up of the tension until a shocking, grim release right at the very end, with only the ending being a slight deviation from the usual quite gentle scares of Victorian horror. It fits what we imagine the cliches to be, but uses them well enough that it reminds you why they're cliches in the first place.

And... that's part of the issue I had with it. I think it cleaving so strongly to a particular idea of Victorian ghost stories creates some dissonance and makes it much more noticeable when it deviates. Notably there's motor cars and electric(? or piped gas?) lighting with running water even on a spit of land in the sea in the arse end of nowhere. I was surprised how much this bothered me - it must be interwar period but it just feels so strangely out of place in a story that otherwise wants so badly to be THE Victorian ghost story. I kept trying to pin down what era this could actually be, which was distracting.

The ending is another element to this - I'm hardly an *expert* on the genre in its 19th century form but in interviews she's cited Henry and MR James and the ending strikes me as much more... aggressive? Than either of those. Which is maybe unfair, just somehow it felt out of line from my expectations usually ghosts stick in one place, and the occasions they chase you are due to very specific "fair" actions that you take, eg taking a haunted object. A ghost killing your wife and child in a place hundreds of miles away years after just feels wrong and again that sounds unfair? But it's precisely because it otherwise works so hard to evoke our ideas of the Victorian style that it felt dissonant to me.

You shouldn't take this as too harsh a criticism - I did genuinely enjoy it and was glued the whole way through. It is really a perfect example of what someone nowadays imagines a Victorian ghost story to be, and avoids some of the boringness of the originals without ever upping the stakes like a more modern story might, trusting that its evocation of a sinister atmosphere will do the job (and it does). Plot wise, I really would have loved to know how on earth Alice Drablow lived and transacted her affairs, but ah well.… (lisätietoja)

Why write a book that's just a succession of sad events? Giving it 2 stars regardless of the writing being decent as rebellion against it. I have no idea if any of the events depicted in the book are realistic (is this what a mining village was really like? who knows!) but it's just a cavalcade of misery happening to a single family who are apparently ridiculously unlucky in every way. They have some choice over their fate but they always make the bad decision. The thing is the writing is pretty solid - it doesn't go in for florid descriptions, there's no deep conversations, but the 2 main characters still feel reasonably fleshed given the short length of the book. Yet at the same time I didn't feel much emotional connection to them: I think I just tuned out after a certain point when I realised they exist just to have bad things happen to them. I don't know if there's anything to take away from it either. That life is cruel and you're screwed whether you stay within the pattern set or if you try and get out of it? I think I'm being too harsh here. Maybe I'm just really not in the mood for fiction right now. I don't know.

Re the ending I don't buy at all that he'd get the death penalty for that, given the killing was clearly not intentional, the attack was provoked and it wasn't pre-meditated. but hey You can't say for sure cause there's 0 indication of when this book is set. Oh well… (lisätietoja)