Read with caution: Cleaning companies may never be the same again! I’ve come to Kate Atkinson late in her career: I can recall surprisingly vividly my mother’s water damaged, crinkly paper copy of Behind the Scenes at the Museum teetering on the side of the bath – an avocado kitsch bath – from my childhood…
Tag: Simon Serrailler
The Comforts of Home, Susan Hill
How does Simon Serrailler recover from a vicious assault at the hands of paedophiles, which left him on the verge of death? How does Serrailler manage his post-traumatic stress disorder? Entry number nine in Susan Hill’s DCS Simon Serrailler series picks up where the previous novel, The Soul of Discretion, finishes: Serrailler is in hospital…
The Soul of Discretion, Susan Hill
Trigger Warning: child sexual abuse and rape. Ah, Susan Hill, you seemed to have taken a different direction with this book from the rest of the Serrailler series. Had the gentility of Lafferton started to wane for you? Was there only so much you could do with the cloistered – and I choose that metaphor…
Weekly Round Up: 2nd July 2018
Exciting news this week! New blog features have arrived! Well, been made. By me. I’m not sure they quite work right, but as I’m seeking access to ARCs and am signed up to NetGalley and other blogging lists, I learn that a Review Policy is required. It sounds terribly formal and… binding. But if these…
The Betrayal of Trust and A Question of Identity, Susan Hill
Ahhhh Lafferton. Possibly even more dangerous than Midsomer or a dinner party with Jessica Fletcher and Jane Marple! The serial killer centre of England. I’ve lost track of the numbers of serial killers in the Simon Serrailler series: they’ve targetted women for medical reasons, abducted young children; they’ve targetted weddings and, now, the elderly in…
Weekly Round Up: 26th June 2018
As we continue to slog through exam marking, the time available for reading has alas dropped and the wakefulness and attention span when the time arrives is also limited! I am continuing to listen to Jessie Burton’s The Muse on the journeys into and out of work and enjoying the characters of Odelle and Olive. It isn’t…
The Shadows In The Street, Susan Hill
Okay. Please put Lafferton and Bevham in the list of places I don’t want to visit because of their high body count. Midsomer, Stockholm, Lafferton. Poor Lafferton. I think this, the fifth book in Susan Hill’s Simon Serrailer series, has the third serial killer in the Cathedral city since the first book. I don’t think…
The Risk Of Darkness, Susan Hill
This will be a fairly brief review for two reasons: firstly, I thought I’d already reviewed it and only realised when I tried to link my review of The Vows of Silence to it that I’d not; and secondly, it is very much a continuation of the second novel, The Pure In Heart. Serrailler is…
The Vows Of Silence, Susan Hill
Susan Hill is, without doubt, a fantastic writer. The Woman In Black is an exquisitely crafted horror; Strange Meeting is exceptional. so I am persevering with these detective novels hoping for … well something. But I’ve not found it yet. I really don’t know what it is that’s missing but something is. The plots are decent enough: this…
The Pure In Heart, Susan Hill
I’m genuinely unsure of what to make of this book. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad book; listening to it as an audiobook was a pretty pleasant way to spend my journeys to work. But it didn’t seem to be what it was packaged as and marketed as: a crime mystery. It felt…
