A lonely woman of 53 never returns from a morning run - hidden in her cupboard is an expensive pair of cugg-links with a note: 'To You, with all possible love from your devoted, Me'. A girl vanishes in the dusk - is it to do with her teenage crush on Dava, the blue-eyed ' therapist' whose speciality is 'inner harmony'? Experienced policemen know that most missing persons either turn up or go missing on purpose. But fresh-faced DS Freya Gresham won't drop it - what could possibly link the people who disappear on 'The Hill', young and old, men and women, even a little dog? In Various Haunts of Men, Susan Hill has created an absolutely convincing small cathedral town (within the orbit of a large urban city). She has peopled it with 'real' characters - the husband-and-wife GPs, the exceedingly dodgy surgeon, the grieving widow who is helped through the ritual of Christmas by her kindly neighbour, the down-to-earth flatmate ... and the tall blond police officer, Simon, who stands at the centre of an ordinary world in which gruesome things go on in lock-up garages.