Except a murder isn’t what they get here: instead, three women (and a man, though his disappearance apparently isn’t noticed) go missing over the span of several weeks. It’s the kind of community that would be shocked by a murder. Simon Serrailler describes it as "a jumped up market town", just big enough that not everyone knows everyone else, but the degrees of separation must be pretty close. Lafferton, the setting of The Various Haunts of Men is a cathedral town. In these stories, it’s not the policework or even the mystery that matters so much as the effect of the crimes on the collective psyche of the town in which they take place.
It’s second only to the Agatha Christie country house detective. Oh, I do enjoy the conceit of the English country novel.
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