Book Review of A Change of Circumstance by Susan Hill

 

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Detectives can never really solve suicides

I read this, the latest crime novel in the “Simon Serrailler” series immediately after reading the first. It is good, but didn’t grip me as much as “The Various Haunts of Men.” There is perhaps one plot thread too many, concerned with the central character’s nephew’s love life. Yes, it shows that while one family is being completely destroyed by the “County Lines” drugs trade, others are grappling with less dramatic but “real” problems. But it’s a bit too peripheral.

The meat of the story, though, is well-researched and actually quite realistic, especially as a provincial police force and its chief constable are surprised and wrong-footed by something they actually had plenty of warning of, from the past experience of their own senior officers. The novel draws parallels between the abuse of children by “County Lines” pushers grooming them as drugs mules and the abuse of children being groomed by paedophiles. And this is fair enough. In both cases, the children are generally powerless to expose or resist those hurting them and those responsible for their well-being are frequently unable or unwilling to comprehend what is going on, let alone take effective action. The effect is to isolate the children from all help and all non-destructive solutions. The author does a good job in showing how an alert and streetwise parent can make the difference between hope and despair, but she also shows that the druggies strive to avoid targetting children with that sort of parent still on the scene.

The over-arching message of this novel is that the advent of “County Lines” has completely removed any element of choice and free will from the drugs trade for anyone except those at the very top. (I would suppose, myself, that even those people must live with the constant threat of assassination even if they are immune from arrest!) Anyone who voluntarily interacts with the drugs trade by buying its products is guilty of abusing the children doing the legwork, but those who do this are completely incapable of ever recognising that THEY are the source of such misery. And so it continues.

One of the peripheral plot threads concerns the central character sorting his personal life out. He’s spent the entire series not doing this, so I suspect that author is trying to bring the series to a final conclusion and it probably is about time.

 

A Change of Circumstance by Susan Hill is published in the UK by Vintage on the 7^th of October 2021.