Page Updated: 09/07/2007

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Reginald Hill - Page 3

The Wood Beyond Born Guilty Pictures of Perfection Blood Sympathy The Only Game

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Paperback - Harpercollins (1998)

First British Edition Harpercollins (1996)

The Wood Beyond
See Review by Liz Lees
See Review by Andrew Taylor - author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series
A ravaged, cratered wood, a man in uniform long dead - this is not a World War One battlefield, but Wanwood House, a pharmaceutical research centre.
Peter Pascoe attends his grandmother's funeral, and scattering her ashes leads him too into war-ravaged woods in search of his great-grandfather who fought and died at Passchendaele.
Seeing the wood for the trees is the problem for Andy Dalziel when he finds himself fancying an animal rights activist, despite her possible complicity in a murderous assault and her appalling taste in whisky.
The Wood Beyond presents a cast of fascinating characters and a mind-bending puzzle, leading us to the wild side of pastoral, through fields where nothing may safely graze, into woods where no bird dares sing…
Award-winning crime novelist Reginald Hill was hailed as "the crime novel's best hope" (The Times) with his first book, and twenty years on he "stakes a claim as our finest living crime writer" (Sunday Telegraph)
'Hill's wit is the constant, ironic foil to his vision, and to call this a mere crime novel is to say Everest is a nice hill' Frances Hegarty, Mail on Sunday
'Their [Dalziel and Pascoe] double act… is one of the delights of English crime fiction' Marcel Berlins, The Times
'This is as good as the English detective novel gets' GQ
"One of Britain's most consistently excellent crime novelists.... He pays attention to the old-fashioned virtues: meticulous plotting, authentic characterisation and realistic dialogue" Marcel Berlins The Times
'Hill's central characters are so real that you can picture them instantly and his grasp of local Yorkshire life is as sure as his always sharp gift for narrative' Steve Grant, Time Out

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Born Guilty
See Review by Val McDermid - Gold Dagger winner & creator of Lindsay Gordon, Kate Brannigan & Tony Hill
Hurrying out of St Monkey's Church, Joe Sixsmith stumbles across a boy's corpse and into more trouble than he's ever known... Soon his casebook is full to bursting: Mrs C demands to know how the boy got there; exotic punk Gallie urges him to find the stranger nosing into her granddad's past; while Butcher is hellbent on digging the dirt on a deputy head's out-of-school activities.
Ever valiant for truth, Joe threads his mild-mannered way through the mean streets of Luton, fighting off angry cops, demented druggies and the matchmaking machinations of his Auntie Mirabelle. But the truth he discovers does not set him free, for there's little joy in confirming that today's kids grow up so much faster than he did, and even the luckiest of them find out all too soon that they have been born guilty.
'One of Britain's most consistently excellent crime novelists' The Times
"Crime fiction with a gentle touch and a good deal of humour from one of the modern masters of the police procedural" Susanna Yager, Sunday Times
"The plot thickens splendidly, and a colourful medley of vividly drawn characters join the parade" James Melville, Ham & High
"Hill is a writer without discernible weakness. He’s a sly observer and trenchant critic of British society and a deft hand at the literary quip and allusion." George Osgerby, Tribune

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Pictures of Perfection
High in the Mid-Yorkshire dales stands the pretty village of Enscombe, proud survivor of all that history has thrown at it. But now market forces mass at the gates and the old way of life seems to be changing East. The Law can do little to stop the ever-growing crimes against tradition, but when a policeman goes missing DCI Pascoe gets worried. Andy Dalziel thinks he's over reacting until the normally phlegmatic Sergeant Wield shows signs of changing his first impressions of village life.
Over two eventful days a new pattern emerges, of lust and lying, of family feuds and ancient injuries, of frustrated desires and unbalanced minds. Finally, inevitably, everything comes to a bloody climax at the Squire's Reckoning, when the villagers gather each Lady Day to feast and pay old debts ... and not even the presence of the Mid-Yorkshire CID trio can change the course of history ...
'For suspense, ingenuity and sheer comic effrontery this takes the absolute, appetising biscuit' Sunday Times

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Blood Sympathy
Reginald Hill's brilliant new series featuring Joe Sixsmith PI can mean many things, but can it really mean a balding, middle-aged redundant lathe operator from a high rise in Luton? Joe Sixsmith thinks it can. His Aunt Mirabelle thinks you'd have to be crazy to hire him, and Joe's current clients certainly fit the bill. One seems to be confessing to the brutal murder of his whole family; another thinks she's a witch. Alongside these, the two heavies who believe Joe is hiding their illicit drugs seem almost normal.
'Splendid comic moments in this entertaining mystery' Sunday Telegraph
'Hill mixes mayhem, voodoo, mirth, racism and serendipity with superb craft' John Coleman, Sunday Times
'It [Blood Sympathy] presents a thoroughly engaging investigator and gets the utmost entertainment form its central device of fortuitous elucidation' Patricia Craig, TLS
'Hill takes a sharply comic look at attitudes further south' Matthew Coady, Guardian

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Paperback - Harpercollins (1997)

First British Edition Harpercollins (1991)

The Only Game
A child vanishes. Has he been kidnapped? Did he run away? Was he murdered? The child's mother comes originally from Londonderry, a fact which Detective Inspector Cicero cannot entirely ignore, if only because of his own experiences in Northern Ireland, experiences which have left all too visible traces across half his face.
But just why is Superintendent Toby Tench leaving his devious Special Branch footprints all over Dog Cicero's Romchurch patch? And why does he want the courts to release Jane Maguire on bail after she has confessed to the murder of her little boy?
Tench plays his cards close to his chest, and Cicero soon finds out the odds are stacked against him both personally and professionally. But Dog's a gambling man, and when death's the only game in town a gambling man has got to play.
First published as a Patrick Ruell novel
'Reginald Hill keeps one on the edge of one's wits throughout a bitterly enthralling detection thriller' Sunday Times
'Read him.' London Review of Books

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