Love lies bleeding
Andrew Taylor
THE VOWS OF SILENCE by Susan Hill Chatto, £12.99, pp.336, ISBN9780701179991 ✆ £10.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The Vows of Silence is the fourth novel in Susan Hill’s crime series. Like its predecessors, it is concerned with murder and its investigation in and around a cathedral city known as Lafferton, and with the lives of those concerned. The central character of the series, Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler, is now working for the Serious Incident Flying Taskforce. Serrailler is a civilised but solitary man who finds personal relationships difficult even with his family — with the exception of his sister Cat, a local GP, her husband and young children. His sense of isolation is increased by the presence of a new colleague whom he finds it hard to like.
The novel opens with a man stalking and shooting a stag, which serves as the prologue for the main business of the plot. A gunman is preying with uncanny precision on Lafferton’s young women. His victims are brides, both potential and recent. There are no clues. The professionalism of the marksman and the apparently random nature of the shootings have turned the case into a nightmare for the investigating officers. The police cannot even be sure that there is only one killer.
Panic spreads through the town. Two forthcoming events increase the already unbearable pressure on the police to get results: the Jug Fair, a large and longestablished local jamboree; and the cathedral wedding of the Lord Lieutenant’s daughter, a ceremony which some prominent Royal guests are expected to attend.
There is another, thematically linked strand to the narrative. This concerns Serrailler’s private life. This family is still grieving for two recent deaths when Cat’s husband, another GP, is diagnosed with a brain lesion. The consequences unfold, rapidly and shockingly. Meanwhile Serrailler’s recently widowed father finds another woman. Similarly, a widow whom Cat knows looks for a new partner over the internet. A friend is dying of cancer, and the only person she wants to see is a woman priest who in the past posed a dangerous threat to Serrailler’s self-imposed isolation.
Susan Hill’s crime novels are getting better and better. Though her series format is of course familiar, she brings to it qualities that make it her own. The main plot is straightforward enough — who is the killer and will he be caught? — but the narrative is so streamlined and effective that it races beautifully along until it smacks against the buffers of an unexpected but entirely convincing ending. The technicalities of police investigation seem plausible, as does the interaction between the officers. The novel gains depth, not distraction, from the wealth of other stories that cluster around the private lives of its characters. Much of it unfolds in dialogue or short, crisp sentences. (Incidentally, Hill is particularly good at using her prose to modulate the pace of the narrative.) On one level, this is a book about sudden and premature death and its effect not only on those who die but also on those who remain. Here, whether death comes with a bullet or a tumour, it is a blunt instrument that destroys peace and forces a brutal reassessment of life’s priorities. Perhaps this is the central question that Hill poses in this gripping and thought-provoking novel: how on earth do we cope?
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