Every reader worth his or her salt has a detective series in their back pocket. I thought in Simon Serrailler I had found mine.
But you know, I am not so sure.
This is the fourth book in the series. Simon Serrailler is the Detective Superintendent of the village of Lafferton, in Engalond, where terrible things just seem to happen. In the first book there was a serial killer on the loose, in the second book some children go missing and the perpetrator is not found until the third book. Here in the fourth book Lafferton is once again haunted by a killer on the loose, shooting women seemingly at random.
Serrailler himself is my kind of guy. He leads a double life, one side police detective, the other side an introverted artist, specializing in drawing. He's rather good at it, taking trips to Italy to draw various pieces of architecture and maybe some birds, women sitting idly at cafes; he's even had a few exhibitions. But he does it all under a nom-de-art of....I can't exactly remember. He is a man that takes after my own heart, in many ways.
The problem with Hill's books is that there is not really enough of him. She has populated the books with other characters - Simon's father, mother, sister, all doctors and still in Lafferton. There are the people working under Serrailler who come and go, move up and get demoted. And then of course there are a few ancillary characters who are usually involved with the story somehow but not as much in this book, and then there are several chapters written from the point of view of the killer himself. The shifting points of view can be distracting, and Hill feels it necessary to fill in the details of all her characters, and it can be a bit much.
She packs a lot into her books. In this one Cat Deerbon (Simon's sister, whom he loves dearly) has just returned from a vacation in Australia only to find out her husband has a malignant brain tumor. Jane Fitzroy, a woman who ran away from Simon to a convent after he had confessed his love for her (a very big deal for a man as introverted as mister Serrailler) is back, sort of, the convent life decidedly not for her, and she is set up to play a bigger part in the next book. And then there is the story of Helen Creedy, who falls in love with a man online who seems a bit odd, and we think all the time that something horrible is going to happen to her. Could her new love be the killer? What about her disaffected and incredibly religious son Tom? Could he be killing in the name of?
Amongst all of this there is a killer that Serrailler must catch. This books seemed more of a continuation of the Serrailler saga with a murder or two thrown in just because Serrailler is a detective and that is his job.
Clearly, looking back, these books have been good enough to get me this far into the series. The first and second were excellent. The third was maybe a little so so. This one was probably the worst so far, but it still held my interest. I'll give Susan Hill another chance on this one, and meet the good people of Lafferton again in a bit.
Incidentally, Susan Hill is the author of many books, notably the Woman in Black, turned into a movie starring that cheeky little Englishman....what was his name.....Radcliffe. Yeah. THAT was a scary book. A good old fashioned ghost story. She is a talented writer....I just don't think the Vows of Silence is one of her best.
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