Asking for the Moon
A Collection of Dalziel and Pascoe Stories
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- €4.49
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- €4.49
Publisher Description
‘Hill is an instinctive and complete novelist who is blessed with a spontaneous storytelling gift’ Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday
If you’ve already met Dalziel and Pascoe, you’re in for a treat. If you haven’t yet had the pleasure, you’re in for a revelation! Here in four stories we track their partnership from curtain-up to last act; from the mean streets of Mid-Yorkshire to the mountains of the moon.
The Last National Service Man reveals the truth, hitherto buried in police files, of their momentous first encounter, while Pascoe’s Ghost is a chilling tale taking us deep into Poe country. Dalziel’s Ghost, meanwhile, finds the man who normally wouldn’t be seen dead in a graveyard expressing a surprising interest in the ‘other side’. And finally, One Small Step takes a giant leap forward to the first murder on the moon.
Reviews
‘Few writers in the genre today have Hill’s gifts: formidable intelligence, quick humour, compassion and a prose style that blends elegance and grace’ Donna Leon, Sunday Times
‘The fertility of Hill’s imagination, the range of his power, the sheer quality of his literary style never cease to delight’ Val McDermid, Sunday Express
‘He is probably the best living male crime writer in the English-speaking world’ Andrew Taylor, Independent
‘Reginald Hill’s novels are really dances to the music of time, his heroes and villains interconnecting, their stories entwining’ Ian Rankin, Scotland on Sunday
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The young and cultured Peter Pascoe and the rotund, gruff Andy Dalziel have been paired to memorable effect in several outstanding crime novels (most recently, Beyond the Wood). Now, Hill's loyal readers are presented with four novellas that, in turn, introduce the pair, let each take a rare solo detecting flight and, perhaps weirdest of all, enter a space-age future for an almost absurd swansong for the mismatched twosome. Dalziel is taken hostage in the first story, "The Last National Service Man," and the young Pascoe gets to meet the tough Yorkshire copper for the first time under very strained circumstances. Ghost stories permeate the next two adventures, "Pascoe's Ghost" and "Dalziel' Ghost." In the first, Pascoe hunts in vain for a missing woman; in the next, the duo sit out a long night in a haunted house, and Dalziel, after several good-sized hits on the whisky bottle, lets slip a few secrets from his past. Finally, in "One Small Step," an older, gout-riddled Dalziel is taken aboard a space ship at the start of the 21st century, after a French astronaut trips and dies stepping onto the moon in full view of the TV cameras. As always, Hill enjoys tampering with the traditions of the genre and these four works serve less as working narratives than as welcome changes of pace that incorporate character studies, intimate and unguarded moments and flights of pure fancy.
