Hither Page, by Cat Sebastian

[Ulysses]

Hither Page
By Cat Sebastian
Published by the author, 2019
Five stars

“Have you ever met a rich man somebody didn’t want to kill?”

I’ve read a lot of favorable commentary about this book, and I was not disappointed in the least. Cat Sebastian – who, against all logic, is an American and from, as she puts it, a swampy part of the South, somehow captures the language and the sense of place of a British writer. I am a snob and a sucker for British authors, not to mention historical fiction, and Sebastian is spot on.

In “Hither Page” she revisits a popular setting for such authors – England after a war. In this case, because the cast is what we’d called today “intergenerational,” she actually looks at the aftermath of two devasting wars and its effect on her characters.

The setting as well is (I’m sure) intentionally familiar for any reader of a certain age. It can’t be an accident that the drama takes place in a cozy rural village outside of London called Wychcomb St. Mary, which calls to mind for any mystery aficionado the village of St. Mary Meade, wherein lived Agatha Christie’s redoubtable Miss Marple.

It is exactly this sort of small town – unexceptional, lacking in any great interest – that has drawn back James Sommers, a young doctor who spent happy times with his uncle there as a boy. Sommers has returned to the village in 1946, after serving faithfully, and even heroically, on the field of battle. He seeks out the peace and safety of his childhood memories. He is looking for a place to dampen his nightmares of violence and carnage.

And it works, until a dead body turns up.

Leo Page is a very different sort of young man. He comes to Wychcomb St. Mary with orders to “get to the bottom of things by any means necessary.” Since his own bleak boyhood, his training has been specific and extensive. Leo is a great pretender, and indeed hardly knows who he really is. He is not beset with bad dreams, but finds himself rootless, without a home or anything approaching a family. Leo quickly finds himself drawn into the mildly claustrophobic society of James Sommers’s village. What disturbs him most is how much he enjoys it.


“Leo was a weapon, and he didn’t care for the idea of being aimed by a stranger.”

The narrative links James and Leo in a way that seems both far-fetched and entirely logical, and from there the author leads the reader in a charmingly choreographed dance, as the two young men find out each other’s secrets, and with them the secrets of all of Wychcomb St. Mary’s. A rich lot of secrets it is, too, as fifty years of local history gradually reveal themselves to the doctor and the sleuth, each of them seeking some kind of personal solace and truth. Every character is richly painted and full of detail, keeping us increasingly on edge as the plot gets more puzzling and provocative. Who is a killer? Who is a victim? What is Leo supposed to do about it? What the hell is going on?

Kudos to Cat Sebastian for pulling this off, and for giving us gay characters who are not of our time, but authentically of the time in which she places them. I note that this is tagged as “Page & Sommers #1,” which gave me goosebumps of pleasure.