The Comforts of Home by Susan Hill

I have just spent a very enjoyable couple of days in the company of Simon Serrailler. Some of you will know that he is the central character in a series of murder mystery novels by Susan Hill. The most recent in paperback is the 9th, The Comforts of Home. I am delighted to know that I can spend a whole lot more time with this man simply by reading the eight books that come before this one.

I meet DC Simon Serrailler for the first time in hospital. He has been seriously injured – I assume at the end of the book just before this one – and is about to have surgery. It seems he is very lucky to be alive – but he survives only by having his left arm amputated. After his release from hospital, on leave from his job, he visits the remote Scottish island of Taransay. A place he has been before, and I suspect things have happened there in the past, that I will also discover in earlier novels.

I very much enjoyed reading The Comforts of Home and appreciated the fact that the author did not feel the need to fill in the past – there are passages that introduce characters in Simon’s family and his past quite seamlessly as we follow several storylines involving Simon’s sister and her family, as well as the mother of a young woman who went missing five years earlier.

While on Taransay, where he has not been for some time, Simon catches up with old friends, and meets a newcomer who has moved to the island since his last visit. The island is isolated, a spectacularly wild and beautiful place. A place where Simon finds peace and time to heal. But, it seems it is also a place of secrets – and while Simon is there, a place of death.

As a policeman Simon has learned to compartmentalize his life “when you could not deal with something shocking and distressing immediately, you learned to park it. Not to bury it.” This is how he has dealt with many things in the past, and is now dealing with the loss of his arm, and the fact that he could very well not have survived his injuries. This death on Taransay affects Simon deeply.

What Simon discovers in his investigation is something that he chooses to deal with in a way that calls for moral and ethical decision making – to his mind there is only one approach. All actions have results – or not – and choices have consequences. The consequences of Simon’s choice this time will be one that he must “park” for a while.

Once back at home in Lafferton, Simon is faced with more physiotherapy as he is fitted for a prosthetic arm, and he is thick in the middle of family concerns and the investigation of a cold case, as he eases himself back in to work.

In this particular book there is a sub-plot that involves the lack of resources in the police force – and the work that does not get done because of a shortage of people to do the work. And it is the same situation in the hospital where Simon was treated, where his father once worked, and has also become a patient. Simon’s sister, who worked as a General Practitioner because she wanted quality time with patients who she would know over many years, is now frustrated with how very little time she has for each patient and is unhappily working as a locum. She is seriously considering the offer of a job in private practice outside of the NHS.

If the other books in this series are as good as this one, I know I will find myself reading not only well written and plotted novels, but novels that make the reader think about the characters as real people, and the choices made as having real effects.