The Only Game

‘One of Britain’s most consistently excellent crime novelists’ Marcel Berlins, The Times ‘[Reginald Hill] keeps one on the edge of one’s wits throughout a bitterly enthralling detection thriller’ Sunday Times

When a four-year-old child is abducted from an Essex kindergarten, Detective Inspector Dog Cicero soon realizes that this is no routine investigation.

Something about the child’s mother troubles him. Maybe it’s the fact that she comes from Derry, and Cicero’s Northern Ireland scars go deeper than his ruined face. But he can’t help feeling there’s more to it than that.

Soon Cicero finds the odds are stacked against him both personally and professionally – not that he will let that stop him. For he’s a gambling man, and when death’s the only game in town, a gambling man has got to play.

Reviews

‘Reginald Hill writes brilliantly throughout, creating memorable characters with chiselled skill’
Sunday Times

‘Reginald Hill stands head and shoulders above any other writer of homebred crime fiction’
Observer

About the author

Reginald Hill was brought up in Cumbria, and has returned there after many years in Yorkshire. With his first crime novel, A Clubbable Woman, he was hailed as ‘the crime novel’s best hope’ and twenty years on he has more than fulfilled that prophecy.