In the golden years of a highly successful career as a writer of mysteries, Reginald Hill must feel all dressed up with no place to go.

		"THE STRANGER HOUSE" By Reginald Hill HarperCollins ($24.95)

His Dalziel and Pascoe police procedurals earned him fame, the highest award of the British Crime Writers Association, the Cartier Diamond Dagger and a series of BBC television adaptations.

Mr. Hill created a new series with a black detective, Joe Sixsmith, and turned to writing traditional novels as well.

"The Stranger House" is certainly a novel, although it contains mysteries and the attempts to solve them.

In it you'll find the pleasures of Mr. Hill's very literate mysteries -- great characters, a mastery of narrative suspense and a witty, earthy sensibility.

But there's more: He also infuses the conventions of this mix of genre fictions with symbolic meanings which suggest that society has advanced little from its violent and primitive past.

Such a serious theme, however, shouldn't scare you away from a story with ghosts, passion (sexual and religious), torture, rape, murder, secret rooms and codes, hidden and stolen manuscripts and enough plot twists to please "DaVinci Code" enthusiasts.

It all begins when Samantha (Sam) Flood and Miguel (Mig) Madero, arrive independently in the English village of Illthwaite in Cumbria and check into the local inn, the Stranger House.

Sam is a young Australian woman, brilliant at math, with a dry sense of humor, who's a student at Cambridge University.

She stops at Illthwaite to learn more about her grandmother, a single teenager who was sent Down Under and died shortly after Sam's father was born in a Catholic orphanage. Why was she sent away, and who was Sam's grandfather?

Mig is a pious young Spaniard who gave up studying for the priesthood to become a historian.

He's in the village hoping to research and write about the fate of an ancestor, Friar Simeon Woolass, a member of an undercover Catholic mission in England in the 16th century, when such people, if discovered, were tortured and usually killed.

While both believe that people and historical records in the village will answer their questions, they quickly learn that many locals, while a colorful lot, are reluctant to speak and, at times, misleading.

The more Mig and Sam search the past, the more they discover that this apparently placid Cumbrian village is no Lake Wobegon.

The villagers exhibit, beneath the placid surface, some of the fierce, pagan character of the Norwegian bachelor pillagers who originally settled the area.

Sam and Mig make quite an effective team. She's plain-spoken, practical and an earthy skeptic, while he's scholarly, idealistic, innocent and a bit of a prig.

If this sounds a bit like the Dalziel-Pascoe partnership, it is certainly appropriate, given Mr. Hill's theme. His literary past persists in this new effort and, one might add, that's all to the good.