I am baffled by and drawn to them in equal measure. The latter partly because of Susan Hill’s wonderful prose and the Audible narration by Steven Pacey. But they are also so irritating. Simon…he’s meant to be this mysterious figure that ladies are drawn to, for some reason, but is completely dull and dour, lacking charisma, totally unsexy or compelling in any way. He also has the emotional intelligence of a gnat and shows no great advances in this department (I’m midway through the series).
Cat, the saint. Will her increasing consumption of wine draw her into untimely alcoholism? I’m reading mainly for this reason.
The middle-classless of it all. Homemade casseroles, a never ending parade of them, ready for Simon at the end of a long day. The backward classes eat sliced white bread, the horror of it!
The crime plots generally underwhelm. Hill seems so focused on subverting the tropes of the genre that endings get rushed, nothing happens, side characters dominate and Simon ends up moping instead of getting any detective work done.
And yet I go on…or maybe this is the end of the line.
by circumlocutious