The Secret of Cold Hill

Product Information

How are you getting on with your grey lady?’ he said, with a strange, quizzical look that immediately unsettled me. I decided to try the audiobook version of this after gleefully discovering I can access thousands of great audiobooks and ebooks for free through my online area library service linked to a great app called BorrowBox. 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.

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 . . . A few days later, a medium who had helped me a lot during my writing of Possession came to the house, and I took her into the atrium, and left her on her own, as she had requested. 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.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.

In fact, as I sit here writing this, I am now positing another possible explanation for some of the confusion. Hmmm...well I’m not going to share it with anyone; they might think I’m a bit crazy to even come up with the idea. The Secret of Cold Hill is now the third book I have read recently that fuses old world gothic history with the contemporary. There is also a strong slant towards technology in this book, as the houses populated by the families of this novel all contain highly modernised home systems that are automated and work on voice recognition. Of course we know that technology is not immune to malfunctions, which occurs in The Secret of Cold Hill, but we do question if something more malevolent is at work.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 asked her if there was anything I could do about this, and she told me that the apparition was of a deeply disturbed former resident of the house, and that it needed a clergyman to deal with it. Being new to audiobooks I’ve realised it’s not only the story, the characters and pace that matters as it does reading a book but also whomever reads the book can make or break it. In this case it didn’t hit the spot on many levels. This is a sequel to Peter James' book "The House on Cold Hill". I enjoyed that book so I figured I would like this one too.

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. 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. This is the 2nd book in the 'House on Cold Hill' series but can easily be read as a standalone but I would definitely recommend reading the other book as well. Now to the story. Slowly odd things begin to happen. Footsteps heard where no one should be walking. Voices talking out of empty space. Disturbing. But not yet scary. Then there are shadows. What is in this house? Jason and Emily learn a little about the area from locals, enough to increase their curiosity. Meanwhile he is working on important art work due before Christmas.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.