Funny enough, I’ve watched a fair bit of Dalziel and Pascoe on the telly without ever reading one of the books. I’m not sure I’ll bother with many more. This really suffers in comparison to the Morse just gone, because it seems to try to do much the same thing, but worse on every count.
The central plot is to do with a killing that Dalziel, the big detective, sees across the road from his house. He’s convinced it’s murder; all the evidence points to suicide, or an accident. He’s right, of course. It’s fairly clear from early on that Swain, the man Dalziel has pegged for the murder, is wrong ‘un, and we only wait to find out how wrong, in what ways. Compare the proper puzzle of the Morse just gone.
So not a huge amount of puzzle, although there’s a certain satisfaction in the gradual unravelling of the skein of lies. There is, however, a huge amount of plot. The central plot is orbited by several others that don’t really connect to it, giving the novel the feel of a soap opera. I think this is partly because this is the 10th or 11th novel in the series, and by now the author really likes a lot of his characters, and feels compelled to give them proper things to do. But even then, we really don’t need the completely extraneous subplot concerning suicidal letters sent to Dalziel. This book did not need to be over 400 pages long. Compare the bare 230 pages of the Morse novel just gone.
Those characters, by the way. Perhaps if you’ve read the previous 10, you find Dalziel compellingly drawn and congenial company, but without that background he comes across as two dimensional and really quite unpleasant. His main traits seem to be drinking and being rude. Super! And rather less attractive than Morse.
Finally, the prose is decent enough, but with a bit too much imitation of accent, and a sprinkling of ten-dollar words that had even your erudite reviewer reaching for the dictionary. Where Dexter’s prose is irritating in ways that still bring you into the text, Hill’s is irritating in ways that take you away from it.
I’m perhaps being a bit harsh; the book does clip along nicely, and I wouldn’t rule out reading another one of these if it fell into my hands. But I’d rather read another Morse.