Review by Booklist Review
In the gently sardonic hands of English author Reginald Hill, the formulaic odd-couple detective tale provides moments of inspired jocularity, sparkling cross-class conversation, and even a few savage emotional broadsides. This third mystery starring Superintendent Dalziel, the burly, blunt, endlessly cunning North Country copper, and his assistant, the thoroughly genteel Inspector Pascoe, lays out major and minor themes like train tracks, parallel for the most part, intersecting on occasion, and, once in a while, when the signals cross, colliding. The major theme has a wife committing suicide in the company of her lover, her husband, and, across the road, his eyes blurred by too many single malts, Superintendent Dalziel. Naturally, the three eyewitness accounts vary enormously. Dalziel also becomes involved with the curious doings of a local theater group and with another troubled woman close to suicide. Through it all, the rough-and-ready Dalziel is surrounded by the usual crew of effete, namby-pamby southern England types with no chins and plummy accents. Hill extracts a remarkable spectrum of nuance from his catalog of genre cliches and breathes new life into characters hired direct from the bad-British-sitcom wing of central casting. --Peter Robertson
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
While one of a police duo follows up on a cache of suicidal letters, his partner is cast as God opposite a murder suspect playing Lucifer in a contemporized medieval mystery play. According to PW , this mystery ``confirms Hill's place among top British writers who produce solid stories of detection that succeed as first-rate novels exploring human character.'' (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
With language that ranges from the purposely vulgar to the awkwardly sublime, author Hill ( An April Shroud, LJ 4/1/86, Deadheads, LJ 5/1/84) traces progress in Detective Andy Dalziel's latest case. Two cases actually coexist, but the rude, callous, fat, and overbearing Dalziel virtually ignores a series of suicide letters from a woman while attempting to prove that a suicide he witnessed was murder. Village inhabitants, meanwhile, prepare for presentation of a cycle of medieval mystery plays in which director Eileen Chung, ironically, wishes Dalziel to play God. Dalziel harasses the suspects in the ``murder'' case, eventually uncovering everything from drug dealing to multiple murder, but he leaves the suicide letters to assistant Pasco. Crisp prose and dry wit add momentum, culminating in bizarre twists and a heartfelt thrust at the end. Recommended for most collections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Yorkshire police duo Supt. Andrew Dalziel and Insp. (now Chief Insp.) Peter Pascoe (Ruling Passion, Underworld) puzzle over a simple-seeming domestic murder--in a grimly witty tale bound to raise Hill's considerable reputation to new heights. Dalziel, a muddled witness to the killing of next-door neighbor Gall Swain, rushes over to her house to find her husband Philip and her lover Greg Waterson with the body. Both men testify that Gall was depressed, strung-out, and bent on suicide; Philip had accidentally killed her trying to wrestle the gun away. But that isn't what Dalziel saw, and his doubts, intensified when Waterson calmly disappears from a hospital bed minutes after leaving his statement, lead the department along a trail from Swain's fanatically religious business partner Arnie Stringer and his drab daughter Shirley Appleyard (what's become of the wastrel seducer her father forced to marry her?) to Waterson's unhappily estranged wife Pamela (has she been under her husband's orders to steal drugs from the hospital where she's a nurse?)--with casually mordant detours into a series of gang beatings (whose latest victim is gay Sgt. Wield) and hints of skullduggery at Swain & Stringer's latest building project: a new garage for the police department. Hill signals his serious intentions from the outset with a subplot--Dalziel is shanghaied into playing God to Swain's Lucifer in dazzling Eileen Chung's presentation of medieval mystery plays, while Pascoe tries to figure out who's been sending Dalziel letters threatening suicide. But Hill doesn't really need the subplot to give the relation between Swain and Dalziel as his nemesis depth or resonance, because the events that unmask Swain are quietly, cumulatively hair-raising all by themselves. Hill's most ambitious Dalziel/Pascoe novel yet--and one whose humor, keenness, and insight place him securely in the company of Ruth Rendell and P.D. James, and well ahead of most of their recent work. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
