The Stranger House -- Reginald Hill

Reginald Hill's new book isn't a Dalziel/Pascoe mystery.  It's a stand-alone novel set in Cumbria:

This was the setting of my formative and is the setting of my degenerative years and I feel some natural unease at locating on my own doorstep a story which is full of eccentric people often behaving badly.  So let me state without reservation that the valley of Skaddale and its village of Illthwaite are entirely figments of my imagination.  Their names, population, history and topography are invented, and they bear no relation other than the most basically generic to any real places.

This means that my dear friends, my excellent neighbors, and indeed all occupants, native or new-come, of this loveliest of landscapes can rest peacefully in their beds.

And so can their lawyers.

My heroine's terms of reference are mathematical, my hero's religious.

No theologian or mathematician I have met provides a model here.

Yet, despite the above disclaimers, it should be remembered that just as theologians and mathematicians use impossibilities, such as the square root of minus one or the transubstantiation of wine into blood, to express their eternal verities, so it is with writers and their fictions.

In other words, just because I've made it all up doesn't mean it isn't true.

After reading that except from the introduction, I don't know why you'd need any more convincing. 

(But if you do, I loved it.  In The Stranger House, you get a ghost, stigmata, two unsolved mysteries--one from two generations back and one from the sixteenth century, priest-holes, a crucifixion, Norse mythology, a pissed-off Australian mathematician who slings bizarre slang and a blacksmith named Thor.  And that's just off the top of my head.  There's way more.)

(It starts out slowly (in a good way, not in a dragging way) and just gains momentum.  By the middle, I was so hooked that I was reading in the car.  I would read a chapter, stop to let the nausea pass, and then read another chapter.)

Comments

[Sarah I.]

You are so silly Leila. I want this book though!! Don't tell me someone else has it before me, because I want it next.

On the other hand though, I keep forgetting that I am only here for another week so the books the KFL can supply for me are getting limited by time. Pooy.

[c.c.]

Ooh! Oh hurray!

[Leila]

I still have it, but I (and the book) will be back at work on Friday. I'll put it on the hold shelf for you.