I am a huge fan of Susan Hill’s ghost stories, especially her masterpiece The Woman in Black. I have had her Simon Serrailler Detective Series on my To-Be-Read list for a long time. The only reason I hadn’t started it years ago is because I was “saving” it for the time when I would need a great mystery.

Finally, in early November, I caved. And with high hopes, I started the first novel in the series, The Various Haunts of Men.

The Various Haunts of Men started with great promise. Susan Hill is a great writer, after all. The story opens in the quiet cathedral town of Lafferton, where a series of seemingly unrelated disappearances begins to unsettle the community. What looks at first like a few people choosing to walk away from their lives gradually reveals a more troubling pattern.

As Sergeant Freya Graffham, new to the area and eager for meaningful work, starts digging deeper, she discovers threads that the rest of the police force has overlooked, including odd links among the missing and the eerie geography of the surrounding hills.

The character of Freya began as an interesting and intriguing detective adjusting to life away from London and into her new and much smaller community. But she quickly became a joke. Somehow, we are asked to believe that a tough, talented, thirty-something-year-old cop who had worked on the London police force and had already been married and divorced once becomes a stupid, tongue-tied, and breathless 13-year-old whenever she is around her boring boss, Simon Serrailler.

Let’s just say, it has been a long time since I have been as disappointed by a book and an author. I only made my way through 63% of the ebook and then sent it back to the library.