Death’s Jest-Book
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- €9.99
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- €9.99
Publisher Description
Reginald Hill’s best-selling duo, Dalziel and Pascoe, return in this brilliant, complex and ultimately moving crime novel: ‘Reginald Hill is probably the best living crime writer in the English-speaking world’ – Independent
Ex-convict and aspiring academic, Franny Roote, has started writing enigmatic letters to DCI Peter Pascoe who immediately smells a rat. DS Edgar Wield, intervening in a suspected kidnapping, takes a vulnerable rentboy under his wing, one who is hiding an earth-shattering secret. And young DC Bowler is looking forward to a weekend away with his girlfriend – but her dreams are filled with a horror too terrifying to share.
Detective Chief Superintendent Andy Dalziel, lording it over his team, is famed for his omniscience. But even he is unable to foresee the disaster towards which they are all tumbling…
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
‘The finest male English contemporary crime writer’ Val McDermid
‘Reginald Hill’s novels are really dances to the music of time, his heroes and villains interconnecting, their stories intertwining’
Ian Rankin
About the author
Reginald Hill is a native of Cumbria and a former resident of Yorkshire, the setting for his outstanding crime novels featuring Dalziel and Pascoe, ‘the best detective duo on the scene bar none’ (Daily Telegraph). His writing career began with the publication of A Clubbable Woman (1970), which introduced Chief Superintendent Andy Dalziel and DS Peter Pascoe. With their subsequent appearances Reginald Hill has won numerous awards, including the Crime Writers’ Assocation Cartier Diamond Dagger for his lifetime contribution to the genre.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Diamond Dagger winner Hill ties up some loose ends from his previous Dalziel/Pascoe book, Dialogues of the Dead (2002), in this gritty, witty psychological suspense novel, whose title evokes a work by 19th-century poet and dramatist Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Rising academic Franny Roote, in spite of time spent in jail for murder and as a suspect in three other crimes, seems on his way to assured literary fame, and he's been writing DCI Peter Pascoe to share the glad tidings. Roote, in his affectionate, eloquent missives, assures Pascoe that he doesn't hold a grudge is even, perhaps, grateful for the part Pascoe played in his incarceration, which ultimately led to his fulfilling new life. For Pascoe's part, however, the letters are filled with menace and mockery: every reference to Pascoe's wife and daughter, every suspicious circumstance recounted, convinces him that Roote is still a foul crook with vendetta on his agenda. Meanwhile, the burgeoning passion between Rye Pomona and DC "Hat" Bowler, following the grisly end of Dickie Dee, may unsettle readers of Dialogues of the Dead. With so many characters and circumstances that may not be as they appear, this is more of a "who-might-do-what" than a "whodunit." The simultaneous release of the mass market edition of Dialogues of the Dead is fortunate, as the uninitiated would be well advised to read it first. Those who do will want to grab the next volume immediately. (On sale Sept. 26)
