Dalziel & Pascoe 20: Death's Jest-Book by Reginald Hill, ISBN 9780007313204

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In T.L. Beddoes' play Death's Jest-Book, the dead won't lie still in the grave and the living often wish they could. And Reginald Hill's novel is much the same - except perhaps for a few more jests.

The dead-pan joker, Franny Roote, is working on his dead friend's unfinished biography of Beddoes, and with unfinished business between himself and DCI Pascoe to deal with as well. Three times Pascoe has been wrong about Roote. This time he's determined to leave no grave-stone unturned as he tries to prove that the ex-con and aspiring academic is mad, bad and dangerous to know. Meanwhile, Edgar Wield, Quixote-like, rides to the rescue of a child in danger, and finds he's got a rent-boy under his wing. In return, the boy tips him off about the heist of a pricesless treasure, and soon Wieldy's torn between protecting the boy and doing his duty.

His superiors might have worries, but DC Hat Bowler's looking forward to a blissful New Year with the girl of his dreams. The trouble is that that girl is Rye Pomona and her dreams are filled with a horror too terrible to tell - even though Charley Penn throws all his energies into trying to do exactly that.

And over all this activity broods the huge form of Mid-Yorkshire CID's First Mover, DS Andy Dalziel. As trouble builds, the Fat Man discovers (as many deities before him) that omniscience can be more trouble than its worth, and that sometimes all omnipotence means is that you can have any colour you like, as long as it's black.

RRP: $24.99

About the Author: Reginald Hill

Reginald Charles Hill (born 3 April 1936, West Hartlepool, County Durham) is a contemporary English crime writer, and the winner in 1995 of the Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement.

Hill's novels employ various structural devices, such as presenting parts of the story in non-chronological order, or alternating with sections from a novel supposedly written by Peter's wife, Ellie Pascoe (n e Soper). Clues may also be provided in such a way that readers sail past them, only realising at the end how their own assumptions have been exposed. He also frequently selects one writer or one oeuvre to use as a central organizing element of a given novel, such as one novel being a pastiche of Jane Austen's works, or another featuring elements of classical Greek myth. In a different kind of tease, the novella One Small Step (dedicated to "you, dear readers, without whom the writing would be in vain, and to you, still dearer purchasers, without whom the eating would be infrequent",) is set in the future, and deals with the EuroFed Police Commissioner Pascoe and retired Dalziel investigating the first murder on the moon. In another departure from the norm, the duo do not always "get their man", with at least one novel ending with the villain getting away and another strongly implying that while Dalziel and Pascoe are unable to convict anyone, a series of unrelated accidents actually included at least one unprovable instance of murder.

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