Death's Jest-Book (Dalziel & Pascoe, Book 18)

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...

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 thirty years on he has more than fulfilled that prophecy.

'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