Part of the appeal of Hill’s novels starring the south of England Detective Chief Superintendant Simon Serrailler is to keep track of how little police work Serrailler actually gets done. It isn’t that he’s lazy; it’s more that he needs time for leisurely dinners, for his award-winning art projects, and, in the recent book, for his wooing of a new girlfriend. In his spare time, he investigates a cold case involving a teenager who was murdered under baffling circumstances 20 years earlier. Hill gets enjoyable mileage out of both the puzzle and Serrailler’s privileged life.

These strands add up to a novel that is as much an examination of society's often contradictory responses to mental infirmity, terminal illness and euthanasia as a crime story. While this may be a problem for those who come to genre fiction with a particular set of expectations, there's no denying that it's an excellent framework for exploring social issues.

It was the ambition of Dorothy L Sayers to write a crime novel with all the virtues of the mainstream literary novel....Susan Hill belongs in this category. Her crime novels, featuring Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler in the small cathedral city of Lafferton are as much concerned with ethical questions and personal relations as with the solving of crimes. Certainly she gives due attention to these, while never letting the reader forget that there is a mystery to be unravelled. Nor does she downplay the seriousness of murder, though, like Simon, she is aware that murder may be explained and treated sympathetically even though it cannot be excused....What one is aware of throughout is Hill’s keen intelligence, the range of her sympathy and her depth of her moral concern. Her novels are always entertaining but are not only entertainments.

While she never forgets that people read novels for pleasure, and is adept at providing that pleasure, she uses fiction to examine difficult ethical questions about the choices people make and the constraints within which such choices are made. That is why reading these novels, which combine good plots with well-drawn characters and intelligent probing of the way we live now, is so enriching.

Before the English novelist Susan Hill turned to crime fiction, she had established her reputation as a literary writer...Then, a decade or so ago, Hill began to move in a new direction...The result has been her series about Chief Superintendent Simon Serrailler, the top cop in the fictional cathedral town of Lafferton, not far from London. “The Betrayal of Trust” is the sixth novel in the series, and it showcases the virtues, particularly characterization, that a literary writer can bring to the police procedural. It’s a sad novel, filled with illness, death and dying, but beautifully written.