Susan Hill - The Comforts Of Home

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Good, but not Hill's best

The Comforts of home is good, but I don’t think it’s quite up to the exceptional standard of many of its predecessors in this excellent series.

We follow Simon’s recovery, both physical and psychological, after the shocking events in The Soul of Discretion as he eventually travels to Taransay to convalesce. His father is in France and Cat’s life progresses at home in Lafferton, where there is some serious crime and a cold case to investigate. Even on Taransay, Simon becomes involved in a local mystery and then a crime...and therein lie some of my reservations about the book. There is so much happening in so any different places that it loses focus, I think, and Susan Hill’s thoughtful, often profound psychological analyses are less evident.

Her writing is as good as ever, with lovely, unobtrusive prose, extremely well-painted characters and an excellent sense of place on Taransay. However, I didn’t find Cat’s most recent medical dilemmas anything like as interesting as they have been, and other things weren’t quite on Hill’s normally stellar level. One thing that has marked this series as quite exceptional has been her examination of attitudes to death in different circumstances. That is almost wholly absent here (as it was from the previous book), but I was hoping for a similarly incisive portrait of recovery from physical and psychological trauma. It’s not really there; Simon is a closed and introverted character and we actually see very little of what he is going through. As a result, The Comforts Of Home felt rather more like a decent crime novel and a little less like the superb, profound books which have preceded it.

A not-quite-so-good book by Susan Hill is still far better than much of what’s out there and I can still recommend this, but it wasn’t quite the exceptional treat that I was expecting.

(My thanks to Random House for an ARC via NetGalley.)