The Secret of Cold Hill

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There is long-winded focus on things like which flavour chocolate choices are being consumed from a tin or a coffee machine. So much inserted boring and irrelevant detail. This is the second book in the series, but I didn't feel I was missing anything by not having read the first book before I read this one. This seems like a negative review, but it's not entirely. I did enjoy this book. Peter James is a great writer and this book is just as well written. It's easy to read and it is enjoyable. The ghosty bits are suitably chilling. I think I was just a little disappointed, and I expected it to be different. I don't really understand the author's motivation to write this. As the novel progresses, many things begin to become confusing. We see events through Jason’s perspective throughout and when he or Emily is confused or disagree, what are we to think? Does it matter? At one point late in the book, Jason thinks to himself How much, since they had moved here, was real? I think this is an important question as the confusion of the last third of the book actually decreased my feelings of dread. I had been feeling a build up but then I lost where the plot was going along with Jason. But I did enjoy the setting, the varied characters (except Claudette), and the build up . The Secret of Cold Hill isn’t drastically different from the first book in many ways, and it’s not James at his best by any means. I could never quite make my mind up about the ending of The House on Cold Hill. This time out, the resolution is rather a cop-out and not much of a surprise in the scheme of things. There are a handful of genuinely spooky moments where I was glad I had the lights on, but they’re a bit thin on the ground and rely on a fair bit of repetition.

The Secret of Cold Hill is actually the follow-up to James’ earlier book, The House On Cold Hill, which I was sent an ARC copy of by the publishers. James is a bestselling author who’s pretty approachable on social media. He’s shared a photo of my cat with some of his books, he’s replied to a few of my comments on his YouTube channel, and he even let me send him a copy of my first cosy mystery novel, Driven. The following Sunday, we invited her parents to lunch. Whilst she was occupied putting the finishing touches to the meal, I took her mother aside and asked her what exactly she had seen that day we were moving in. She described a woman, with a grey face, dressedin grey silk crinoline, moving across the atrium – exactly what the old man had described to me. But it’s not fair to compare James to Herbert, because while there are passing similarities, they both hold up on their own. It’s pretty exciting to see James taking on more traditional horror like this because he’s mostly thought of as a crime author because of his Roy Grace books. The Secret of Cold Hill shows that he’s far more versatile than that. Even so, I was a little surprised when he cheerfully entered the atrium, stood still for a couple of minutes, and then loudly and very firmly enunciated, into thin air, ‘You may go now!’ There is one thing that never appears in the estate agent brochures: nobody has ever survived beyond forty in Cold Hill House and no one has ever truly left . . .Things start smoothly but both couples sense a feeling of others in their new homes. This only gets worse when one of the locals points out that nobody has ever survived beyond forty in Cold Hill House and no one has ever truly left. This is a great read with strong characters and an addictive story. There are even touches of humour within the haunting chills. I think it also made me reconsider my rating of the first book, and makes me want to put that down from a 5* to a 3.5*. This book was far stronger. The characters were much better (the snobby, horrible neighbours were awful people but so funny, I kind of warmed to them!) and in terms of the haunting, it was less of a movie-cliche, and far more realistic of true hauntings. During the Second World War, the house was used to billet Canadian soldiers. After the War, during the second half of the twentieth century, three couples bought it – and all subsequently divorced. We were the third. Was the Grey Lady in any way responsible? Cold Hill House has been razed to the ground by fire, replaced with a development of ultra-modern homes. Gone with the flames are the violent memories of the house’s history and a new era has begun.

I did like the fact that it seemed very similar at first, because I was expecting it to go off in a different direction, like these guys would do something to break the chain. Again, it was a bit different because there are different ghosts featured than were in the first book, but that really didn't change things much. Nothing amazing happens that didn't happen already in the first book. From the number one bestselling author, Peter James, comes T he Secret of Cold Hill.*****T*he spine-chilling follow-up to The House on Cold Hill. Now a smash-hit stage play.**Jason and Emily Danes move into their new home on Cold Hill, and right away strange things begin to happen. Shadowy figures roam the hallways of the house, thumping noises can be heard from the attic studio, lights turn on and off for no reason. Scariest of all, Jason, an artist, and Emily, a caterer, can hear people talking in their house -- sometimes right in the same room that they're in. Adding to their unease is a sense of isolation resulting from the fact that they are only the second family to have moved into their new housing development. At the time he was officially the Vicar of Brighton – but with another hat, he was also officially, the Chief Exorcist of the Church Of England. That wasn’t his actual title, which was the less flaky-sounding ‘Minister Of Deliverance.’ A former monk, the son of two medics, a university double first in psychology, he was as far from Max Von Sydow’s Father Merrin in The Exorcist as you could get. He is a delightful human being, with whom I had become good friends, and still am to this day. He is a modern thinker, a clergyman who has a problem with the biblical concepts of God, yet still retains an infectious faith. His views, for instance, on the Ouija board are, that far from putting its participants in touch with the spiritual world, it actually opens up a Pandora’s Box of their own inner demons. I’ve been a fan of Peter James for years but it’s hard to believe that the Cold Hill books are written by the same author that brings us the excellent Roy Grace series. The plot itself - a boilerplate ghost story - is fine if you don’t think too hard, but the writing really grated with me and it took a while to figure out why: the dialogue is dreadful. Every spoken interaction sounds like it was written by a chatbot that has never heard an actual human conversation. Random slang in all the wrong places, stilted and repetitive phrasing, and sentence structures that I’ve never heard a real person use when speaking. It’s honestly the weirdest thing, especially when you compare it to James’s other books - and once you spot it, it becomes hugely irritating.