A Question of Identity

When elderly women in Lafferton begin turning up dead, each crime scene bearing the same chilling, deliberate mark, Simon Serrailler finds himself circling a suspect who was tried for murder elsewhere—and walked free. The question of whether this person has disappeared entirely or is hiding in plain sight drives the novel into genuinely unsettling territory, where justice feels fragile and certainty keeps slipping away. Hill builds her stakes not through spectacle but through the quiet horror of a community that believes itself safe, and the weight of that illusion slowly lifting.

What sets this seventh Serrailler novel apart is Hill's refusal to let the procedural machinery overwhelm the human texture underneath it. Her prose is precise and unhurried, each scene carrying emotional residue that lingers longer than the plot mechanics that prompted it. Lafferton itself feels lived-in rather than constructed—a place with its own rhythms and wounds. Readers who have followed Serrailler across the series will find familiar threads pulled tighter here, while newcomers will encounter a detective whose inner life is as complicated as any case he takes on.