Showing results by author "Susan Hill" in All Categories

Eel Marsh house stands alone, surveying the windswept salt marshes beyond Nine Lives Causeway. Mrs Alice Drablow lived here as a recluse. Now Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor with a London firm, is summoned to attend her funeral, unaware of the tragic and terrible secrets which lie behind the house's shuttered windows.

Award-winning author Dame Susan Hill is best known for her hit ghost story The Woman in Black and her popular ‘Simon Serailler’ detective series, but she has also written extensively for radio. This audio anthology includes full-cast adaptations of two of her early novels, plus an additional 12 BBC Radio plays, many of them available for the very first time since their original broadcasts.

A woman vanishes in the fog up on "the Hill", an area locally known for its tranquillity and peace. The police are not alarmed; people usually disappear for their own reasons. But when a young girl, an old man, and even a dog disappear, no one can deny that something untoward is happening in this quiet cathedral town.

The cathedral town of Lafferton seems idyllic, but in many ways it is just like any other place. As part of the same rapidly changing world, it shares the same hopes and fears, and the same kinds of crime, as any number of towns up and down the land.When one day DC Simon Serrailler is called in by Lafferton's new Chief Constable, Kieron Bright, he is met by four plainclothes officers. He is asked to take the lead role in a complex, potentially dangerous undercover operation and must leave town immediately.

Simon Serrailler has just wrapped up an exhausting and difficult case for SIFT – Special Incident Flying Taskforce – and is on a sabbatical on a Scottish island when he is recalled to Lafferton. Two local prostitutes have vanished and are subsequently found strangled. By the time he gets back, another girl has disappeared. Is this a vendetta against prostitutes by someone with a warped mind? Or a series of killings by an angry punter?

DCS Simon Serrailler has long regarded drugs ops in Lafferton as a waste of time. Small-time dealers are picked up outside the local secondary school; they don't have any information about those higher up the chain; they're given a fine or a suspended and away they go. And rinse and repeat. But when the body of a 22-year-old drug addict is found in neighbouring Starley, the case pulls Simon into a whole new way of running drugs. The foot soldiers? Vulnerable local kids like Brookie and Olivia, who will give Simon a bitter taste of this new landscape.

When Simon Serrailler was a rookie constable with the Met, he did something reckless in the course of a night's work which caused a man's death. But his act was praised by his colleagues, and he was called a hero. Years later, now a detective chief superintendent who has been badly injured in the course of duty, he receives a medal for bravery at Buckingham Palace while recollecting that fateful night of his early career, when chance disguised itself as bravery.

Simon Serrailler is faced with that most complicated of investigations - a cold case. Freak weather and flash floods all over southern England. Half of Lafferton is afloat. A landslip on the Moor has closed the bypass and, as the rain slowly drains away, a shallow grave - and a skeleton - are exposed. It doesn’t take long to identify the remains as those of the missing teenager, Harriet Lowther, last seen carrying a tennis racket while waiting for a bus. But that was 16 years ago.

Recovering on a remote Scottish island, his peace doesn’t last long. He is pulled in to a murder inquiry by the overstretched local police. A newcomer, popular with the islanders, has died in perplexing circumstances. The community's reactions are complicated and fragile. It’s good to be back on the job. And when Simon returns to Lafferton, an arsonist is on the rampage and a woman whose daughter disappeared some years before is haunting the police station seeking closure. She will not let it rest, and Simon is called in to do a cold-case review.

Gunmen are terrorising young women in the Cathedral town of Lafferton. What - if anything - links the apparently random murders? Is the marksman with a rifle the same person as the killer with a handgun? Detective Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler falls back on well tried police methods such as questioning neighbours and house-to-house searches.

In this, the 10th Simon Serrailler crime novel, Simon must engage with his own demons as Lafferton struggles to cope with a series of crimes that threaten the sanctity of hearth and home. On the face of it DCS Simon Serrailler has had time to recuperate after the violent incident that cost him his arm and nearly his life. He is back in harness at Lafferton CID but is spending his spare time high up in the cathedral roof, making drawings of some medieval angels which are being restored.

Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler, first introduced in The Various Haunts of Men, is on a painting holiday in Venice when he is summoned home by a telephone call. He has family problems to face, and the stress and grind of running a busy police station. When a little boy is snatched as he stands with his satchel at the gate of his home, waiting for his lift to school, an ordinary community realises that terror and evil are in their very midst.

Following on from the child abduction in her previous novel The Pure in Heart, Susan Hill explores the crazy grief of a widowed husband, a derangement that turns to obsession and threats, violence and terror.

Duchess of Cornwall Close: sheltered accommodation, a mix of bungalows and flats, newly built and not quite finished. Despite the bitterly cold weather, elderly residents are moving in. Then, one snowy night, an old lady is murdered - dragged from her bed and strangled with a length of flex. DCS Simon Serrailler and his team are aware of bizarre circumstances surrounding her death, but keep some details secret while they desperately search for a match. All they know is that the killer will strike again, and will once more leave the same tell-tale signature.

Looking out from Moon Cottage, Susan Hill records the sights and smells, the people, gardens, animals, births, festivals and deaths that mark the changing seasons in the small Oxfordshire community.

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life.

When a bunch of neo-fascist thugs named The Bulldogs attack a Gay pride march in the sleepy country town of Lafferton, detective Simon Serrailler moves quickly to find the assailants. He’s already got his hands full making security arrangements for a memorial service to honour soldiers returning from Afghanistan. When anonymous threats come in, Serrailler wonders if the Bulldogs are behind these too - and worries that they know the Prince of Wales will be in attendance.

Misty Copeland made history as the first African-American principal ballerina at the American Ballet Theatre. Her talent, passion, and perseverance enabled her to make strides no one had accomplished before. But as she will tell you, achievement never happens in a void. Behind her, supporting her rise was her mentor Raven Wilkinson. Raven had been virtually alone in her quest to breach the all-white ballet world when she fought to be taken seriously as a Black ballerina in the 1950s and 60s.

World-changers. Rebels. Rejecters of the status quo. Throughout history, Christians were never meant to have a safe faith. Highlighting people throughout the millennia, this book is a compilation of faith and facts that celebrate the prayer lives of spiritual giants and invigorate your faith.

Late one summer evening, antiquarian bookseller Adam Snow is returning from a client visit when he takes a wrong turn. He stumbles across a derelict Edwardian house, and compelled by curiosity, approaches the door. Standing before the entrance, he feels the unmistakable sensation of a small cold hand creeping into his own, ‘as if a child had taken hold of it’. At first he is merely puzzled by the odd incident but then begins to suffer attacks of fear and panic, and is visited by nightmares.