Product Description: Simon Serrailler is faced with that most complicated of investigations--a cold case. With freak weather and flash floods all over southern England, half of Lafferton is afloat. A landslip on the Moor has closed the bypass and, as the rain slowly drains away, a shallow grave--and a skeleton--are exposed...read more

The Woman in Black is both a brilliant exercise in atmosphere and controlled horror and a delicious spine-tingler -- proof positive that this neglected genre, the ghost story, isn't dead after all. What true readers do not yearn, somewhere in the recesses of their hearts, for a really literate, first-class thriller -- one that chills the body but warms the soul with plot, perception, and language at once astute and vivid? In other words, a ghost story written by Jane Austen? Alas, we cannot give you Austen, but Susan Hill's remarkable Woman in Black comes as close as our era can provide. Set on the obligatory English moor, on an isolated causeway, the story has as its hero Arthur Kipps, an up-and-coming young solicitor who has come north from London to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The routine formalities he anticipates give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister and terrifying than any nightmare: the rocking chair in the deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child's scream in the fog, and most dreadfully -- and for Kipps most tragically -- the Woman in Black.

Simon Serrailler’s story began in The Various Haunts of Men (about a serial killer) and continued with The Pure in Heart (about a kidnapped schoolboy). Susan Hill is not afraid to tackle difficult issues, nor to face up to the realities of stress in an ordinary English police station. Her third crime novel, The Risk of Darkness, even more compulsive and convincing, follows up the child abduction and explores the crazy grief of a widowed husband, a derangement which turns to obsession and threats, violence and terror.Meanwhile, handsome, introverted Simon Serrailler, whose cool reserve has broken the hearts of several women, finds his own heart troubled by the newest recruit to the Cathedral staff: a feisty female Anglican priest with red hair…The Risk of Darkness is packed with action and adventure. Like Various Haunts, it hinges on a terrific twist which comes as a complete surprise to the reader; and like The Pure in Heart, it deals in depth with complex daily problems.From the Hardcover edition.

Arthur Kipps did not believe in ghosts.      Few attend Mrs. Alice Drablow's funeral, and not one blood relative amongst them. There are undertakers with shovels, of course, a local official who would rather be anywhere else, and one Mr. Arthur Kipps, solicitor from London. He is to spend the night in Eel Marsh House, the place where the old recluse died amidst a sinking swamp, a blinding fog and a baleful mystery about which the townsfolk refuse to speak.      Young Mr. Kipps expects a boring evening alone sorting out paperwork and searching for Mrs. Drablow's will. But when the high tide pens him in, what he finds -- or rather what finds him -- is something else entirely.

A lonely woman of 53 vanishes in fog. Experienced policemen know that most missing persons either turn up or go missing on purpose. But fresh young D.S. Freya Graffham refuses to drop the case.

The sequel to Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' returns to the world of Manderley and the haunting presence of Rebecca in the lives of Maxim de Winter and his young bride

The novelist chronicles her real-life struggle to have a healthy second baby and overcome a series of miscarriages and the death of her five-week-old daughter

Essays dealing with reading and authors such as Charles Dickens, John Wain, and Jean Rhys are accompanied by four radio plays