Publisher's Synopsis
A lonely woman of 53 vanishes in fog - hidden in her cupboard is an expensive pair of cuff-links with a note: 'To You, with all possible love from your devoted, Me'. A fat 22-year-old never returns from an early morning walk - is her disappearance connected with her girlish 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 young D. S. Freya Graffham won't drop it - until she discovers what links the people who disappear on 'The Hill', young and old, men and women, even a little dog.;Susan Hill writes with compassion, humour and a unique understanding of the details of daily life.;In Various Haunts of Men, she has created a small cathedral town (within the orbit of a large urban city) and filled it with recognizable characters - the local 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, the unhappy wife who fills her days with charity work - 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 business units?