The Betrayal of Trust
Heavy rains have caused a landslide next to a highway bypass, and a skeleton emerges from the mud. It proves to be the remains of a local teenage girl who went missing sixteen years earlier. Searching the site for evidence, police discover a second skeleton buried next to the first one—it’s another young woman’s, but they can’t figure out who she was: nobody else was reported missing at the time.
Published in 2011, this is the sixth book in a long-running series featuring the fictional UK cathedral town of Lafferton and senior police officer Simon Serrailler.
The lives of a core ensemble of characters in the series—Simon and his physician sister Cat Deerbon and their extended family—unfold from book to book, so there is a point to reading the series in order. However, each of the novels can stand on its own, bringing in a cast of other characters whose stories intertwine and ultimately tie in together. In the end the novels not only resolve the crime or crimes under investigation, but often dig into societal issues along the way.
This book, along with its central crime and mystery, explores wider attitudes and ethical questions around death and dying. The characters whose stories bring these issues to light include:
An elderly woman who has Lou Gehrig’s disease (known as motor neurone disease in the UK) and decides to arrange an assisted suicide while she is still capable;
Two women who have been life partners; one now has dementia and has been bounced from care home to care home because she’s unmanageable;
A young medical student, nearly finished her training, who’s learning how to deal with terminally ill patients.
Despite what might seem a depressing theme, this novel is an engrossing and satisfying read. The lives of Simon, a noted artist as well as a policeman, and his widowed twin sister Cat (actually they are triplets—their brother lives in Australia) add a memorable narrative depth and a human touch.
Born in Yorkshire, Susan Hill has been writing since she was a teenager, and now has over 50 books to her credit. Her first novel, The Enclosure, was published in 1961 while she was in her first year of university at Kings College in London. In 1972 her novel Bird of Night was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and The King of the Castle was longlisted for the Booker in 2010. Her gothic ghost story, The Woman in Black, has been running as a stage play in London since 1989, and became a 2012 horror film starring Daniel Radcliffe.
She wrote her first crime novel in 2004, launching this series with The Various Haunts of Men, featuring police officer Simon Serailler and the town of Lafferton. The tenth in the series, The Benefit of Hindsight, appeared in 2020.
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