Various Haunts Of Men, The

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A lonely woman of 53 vanishes in fog - hidden in her cupboard is an expensive pair of cuff-links with a note: 'To You, with all possible love from your devoted, Me'. A fat 22-year-old never returns from an early morning walk - is her disappearance connected with her girlish crush on Dava, the blue-eyed 'therapist' whose speciality is 'inner harmony'? Experienced policemen know that most missing persons either turn up or go missing on purpose. But fresh young D. S. Freya Graffham won't drop it - until she discovers what links the people who disappear on 'The Hill', young and old, men and women, even a little dog. Susan Hill writes with compassion, humour and a unique understanding of the details of daily life. In Various Haunts of Men, she has created a small cathedral town (within the orbit of a large urban city) and filled it with recognizable characters - the local GPs, the exceedingly dodgy surgeon, the grieving widow who is helped through the ritual of Christmas by her kindly neighbour, the down-to-earth flatmate, the unhappy wife who fills her days with charity work - and the tall blond police officer, Simon, who stands at the centre of an ordinary world in which gruesome things go on in lock-up business units -

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Susan Hill has won both the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham Awards and been shortlisted for the Booker. She is the subject of one of the Vintage Living Texts. She runs her own publishing business, Longbarn Books, and edited the literary magazine, Books and Company. Her novels are set for GCSE and A Level, and her play, The Woman in Black, has been running in London's West End for 15 years.