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THE VOWS OF SILENCE
by Susan Hill
Chatto & Windus, June 2008
336 pages
12.99 GBP
ISBN: 0701179996


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Susan Hill has garnered a possibly disproportionate amount of publicity for her series featuring Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler. My take on her has always been that a 'literary' writer playing in our sandpit is guaranteed lots of attention – despite the fact she's really not producing anything resembling ambitious crime fiction.

So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she's motivated by her characters and storytelling skills, rather than the format. Since we last met our sensitive, artistic cop, he's been promoted and is now with the Serious Incident Flying Taskforce. Nope, I can't tell you what this does, as Simon has swung it that he can investigate cases in his home town of Lafferton.

Now, Lafferton's an ever so genteel cathedral town which does seem to be plagued by nasty rough criminals (who only seem to bump off the working classes, incidentally). This time lone women are being picked off seemingly at random. And to confuse matters more, a rifle and a handgun are being used for the killings, so police may be looking for two killers.

Before I go any further, I have to say that the crime plot is incidental and screamingly obvious, even to someone like me who tends to read for characterisation and not plotting. In THE VOWS OF SILENCE, the private firmly eclipses the professional for our hero. And if you're depressed, don't even go there, as it's angst upon angst for emotionally frozen Simon and his saintly sister Cat.

The success of the book pretty much stands or falls by the reader caring about the Serrailler family – and sad to say, I don't think Hill has done enough to make us care. I've always indulged PD James's tendency to put Adam Dalgliesh on a pedestal, as she presents us with a complex creation. Serrailler veers at times towards the petulant brat (which is a tad unfortunate when you're pushing 40).

Hill also has a heavy hand with religion, which underlies much of this inherently very conservative series. The drippy woman priest, whom I fear we're supposed to see as A Good Person, is back (does anyone else long to shake her and scream "get a proper job in the real world!") The fundamentalist and the atheist are unconvincing and under-drawn respectively.

If you like Susan Hill's books you'll probably like this. And I have to admit that amidst all the eye-rolling and muttering, I devoured it in a couple of days – and I know I'll read the next one in the series . . .

But as a crime novel THE VOWS OF SILENCE is thin in the extreme and as the next installment in the Serrallier family saga, it's like being hit over the head with a sledgehammer. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that Hill is writing crime fiction for people who think the genre is faintly vulgar.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, June 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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