The Hunted, By Wayne Barcomb.   The Various Haunts of Men, By Susan Hill. 
 
The enemy of the good is the perfect, and the enemy of the OK book is the really good one.  So I’m probably not going to be entirely fair to “The Hunted”, because I read it just before “The Various Haunts of Men”.
 
What happens when the man you testified against gets out of jail?  What happens when that man is your father?  For one young woman, the answer is murder.  But who is the woman?  In “The Hunted”, New York City detective Frank Russo is assigned to find out, as political pressure mounts and the death toll rises.
 
If I were grading “The Hunted”, it would get a solid pre-grade-inflation “B”.  It’s well written, suspenseful,  and if coincidences seem too frequent – well, that sometimes happens in real life too.  “The Hunted” didn’t involve me the way that “The Various Haunts of Men” did, but it’s a well-crafted mystery.
 
“The Various Haunts of Men” is a series mystery,  nominally featuring Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler.  People are disappearing in Bavham – but that happens every day, and usually they turn up again without police assistance. With the whole police force concentrating on combating a drug ring, only new Detective Freya Graffham is convinced these people haven’t left of their own volition. 
 
Book jacket verbiage can frequently make you laugh.  Here, the publishers refer to “the elusive Simon Serrailler”.  He is so elusive that he’s practically missing in this book.  Other carry the burden of the narration, and they give you a sense of what it’s like to be a divorced police detective, an elderly widow, or a young doctor in a mid-sized English town. 
 
I wouldn’t recommend “Various Haunts of Men” to those who like intense, tightly focused mysteries. It wanders; aside from murder and its investigation it looks at everything from marital happiness to choir catering and new age medical therapies. But author Hill is also adept at building suspense, and the ending is...amazing.