The Vows of Silence: A Simon Serrailler Mystery - Hardcover

Hill, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590202457 ISBN 13: 9781590202456

Publisher: Overlook Books, 2009

Synopsis

Another wrenching Simon Serrailler novel of love, loss, dreadful crimes, and terror.

We met the enigmatic and brooding Simon Serrailler in The Various Haunts of Men and got to know him better in The Pure in Heart and The Risk of Darkness. The Vows of Silence, the fourth crime novel featuring Chief Inspector Serrailler, is perhaps even more compulsive and convincing than its predecessors.

A gunman is terrorizing young women in the cathedral town of Laffterton. What, if anything, links the apparently random murders? Is the marksman with the rifle the same as the killer with the handgun? With the complexity and character study that earned raves for The Pure in Heart and the relentless pacing and plot twists of The Various Haunts of Men, The Vows of Silence is truly the work of a writer at the top of her form.

About this title

About the Author

Dame Susan Hill is one of the UK’s most accomplished and decorated living authors, a professional writer for over fifty years, and the author of the bestselling Simon Serrailler crime series. In 2020, she was awarded a damehood (DBE) for her services to literature.

Her novels and short stories have won numerous awards, including the Whitbread, the Somerset Maugham, and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. She was also shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize.

Hill is also the author of the internationally celebrated ghost story, The Woman in Black, which has been adapted into a long-running West End play and a major feature film.

In addition to her crime and gothic fiction, her extensive body of work also includes literary novels, children's books, and autobiographical works. She lives in North Norfolk with her family.

Reviews

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by by Maureen Corrigan The death that will haunt you long after reading Susan Hill's new mystery, "The Vows of Silence," is a natural one. Granted, a serial killer is on the loose and young women are being murdered, but it's a mundane killer -- cancer -- whose "crime" is most shockingly dramatized. In this, her fourth police procedural featuring the dour Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler, Hill overturns the usual priorities of the crime novel and devotes her most searing passages not to the twisted rituals of the sniper but, rather, to the exhausting hospital stays and quiet deathbed struggles of a likable minor character in the series. Hill's preoccupying theme in "The Vows of Silence" is the randomness of life. Nothing stays put in the world of this novel: Lovers leave, children and old friends mutate into strangers, and a tumor abruptly starts to grow. The serial killer, who chiefly targets brides, is simply the most extreme manifestation of the imminent chaos that always threatens to destroy what's been taken for granted. Hill is a writer who invites the big theological questions into her stories; indeed, Serrailler's on-and-off love interest, Jane Fitzroy, has been ordained as an Episcopal priest. But neither Jane nor her creator supplies easy answers here to the divine mystery of why good people perish while mangy lowlifes still draw breath. The short chapters told through the serial killer's point of view are the weakest aspects of the novel and should be dispensed with briskly in deference to how terrific the rest is. Our perpetrator boasts the generic serial killer résumé: early psychological damage caused by a woman, easy access to weapons, flexible work hours that allow time for stalking prey. In a classic narrative move patented by Agatha Christie, the evildoer turns out to be Someone We Already Know. Don't worry. I haven't spoiled the suspense. The mandatory moment of unmasking is more ho-hum than humdinger. The somber Serrailler is thrilled to have his sister, Cat Deerborn, back with her husband, Chris, and their young children in the cathedral town of Lafferton (where the series is set) after they've spent months away on sabbatical in Australia. Cat and Chris are both physicians, so when Chris collapses in the bathroom one evening and the consequent brain scans show a large tumor, everyone knows the score. What follows is a deeply affecting account of how these thoughtful characters deal with the shock of that diagnosis. Hill's restrained style rises to the challenge of rendering the horror and helplessness engulfing all concerned. Here's a conversation between Cat and Chris: " 'The thing is,' [Chris] said, 'it's not only that I don't want to leave you and I don't want to leave the children. I don't want to miss them growing up. I don't want not to be here, doing what we do, in this place. The thing is . . . it isn't even that I don't want to die.' "She said nothing. Waited. Whatever it was, he had to say it. To tell her. Whatever it was. "But he was silent. He held her hand to his face a little while longer, then let it go before getting up and wandering away. . . . Cat watched him and as she watched saw that his gait was odd, uneven and slightly unsteady. She closed her eyes, knowing why, too terrified to watch any more." Chris's silence is ascribable not only to the tumor, which is interfering with his cognition, but also to the hard reality that he has no words by which to comprehend his own premature death. When that death arrives, Hill describes it so powerfully that the novel halts, and everything else is aftermath. Aside from the serial killer saga, "everything else" includes other, more engrossing plot strands concerning Serrailler's relationship with the reluctant Jane and the struggles of a widowed friend of Cat's to enjoy a new romance despite the disapproval of her adolescent son, who has fallen prey to a fundamentalist cult. The fact that "The Vows of Silence" is light on what traditionally constitutes a mystery plot hardly registers. It's the intelligence of this brooding series that rivets a reader's attention. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

In Hill's unremarkable fourth novel to feature Chief Insp. Simon Serrailler (after 2008's The Risk of Darkness), Serrailler and his team race against time to stop a killer who's gunning down young women, apparently at random. Newlywed Melanie Drew is the first victim, shot at close range inside her flat in Lafferton. The killer shifts method for his second attack, using a rifle to shoot into a crowd outside a nightclub. Next, he uses a handgun to murder a young mother in front of her toddler. The variety of approaches leads the police to consider whether two different killers are at work, even as Serrailler's sergeant finds the visits of Drew's widowed husband to the scenes of the subsequent crimes suspicious. Hill does a decent job of generating suspense with sections from the murderer's point of view, but many readers will lament the lack of fair-play clues to his identity. Hill is also the author of the acclaimed horror novel The Woman in Black. (Nov.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Overlook Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590202457
• ISBN 13: 9781590202456
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336