Reginald Hill at Tangled Web UK

Page Updated: 09/07/2007

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Reginald Hill - Page 5

The Long Kill
When a hitman starts missing, it's time to retire. And where better than the Lake District where the air is healthy, the scenery spectacular and there's a handsome young widow who's caught your eye!
Everything in this Garden of Eden seems lovely to Jaysmith, But soon he begins to discover, as many another retired man before him, that settling down to the quiet life is not as easy as it seems. His old employers aren't keen to lose him, his past is always lying in wait, and when Anya introduces him to her family, Jaysmith realizes there's no way out. He's back in business, and it makes little difference that this time it's to defend, not destroy. However you wrap it up, his one accessible talent is The Long Kill.

Paperback - Harpercollins (1998)

Exit Lines
Winner of the CWA's Golden Dagger Award
'DRIVER, FAT BASTARD, PISSED'
Three old men died on a stormy November night: one by deliberate violence, one in a road accident and one by an unknown cause.
Inspector Pascoe was called in to investigate the first death, but when the dying words of the accident victim suggested that a drunken Superintendent Dalziel had been behind the wheel, the integrity of the entire Mid-Yorkshire constabulary was called into question.
Helped by the bright but wayward Detective-Constable Seymour, hindered by 'Maggie's Moron', the half-witted Constable Hector, Peter Pascoe entered the twilight and vulnerable world of the senior citizen - to discover that the beckoning darkness at the end of the tunnel held few comforts …
'Mr Hill is quite simply one of the best crime writers of this or any other generation' Police
'Our social consciences kept at as tight a stretch as our puzzler's wits in this brilliant new hybrid' John Coleman, Sunday Times
'Well observed, often funny, reflection of contemporary concerns' The Guardian
'One of the modern masters of the police procedural' Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph
'Here is an author at his formidable best' Frances Hegarty, Mail on Sunday

Paperback - Harpercollins (1997)

First British Edition Harpercollins (1983)

Deadheads
Life has been roses, roses all the way for Patrick Aldermann ever since Great-Aunt Florence collapsed into her Madame Louis Laperrieres, leaving the way clear for Rosemont House and its glorious gardens to come into his possession.
But now here is his employer, 'Dandy' Dick Elgood, suggesting to an incredulous Inspector Pascoe that Patrick has got where he is by killing people. Soon he retracts the accusation, but by then Pascoe and Sergeant Wield have got their teeth into it and Police-Cadet Singh, Mid-Yorkshire's first Asian copper - if he survives the training course - is uncovering some very interesting information about Patrick's elegant wife, Daphne.
Add to this, on the left, Ellie Pascoe, who is trying to radicalise Daphne; and on the right, Superintendent Dalziel, who seems to think Cadet Singh has been provided as his personal tea-boy; and in the middle an irritatingly evasive bunch of burglars; and we have a richly colourful did-he-do-it? with a plot that unfolds like the petals of a rose.
`Their (Dalziel and Pascoe's) double act...is one of the delights of English crime fiction' Marcel Berlins The Times
`Here is an author at his formidable best' Frances Hegarty, Mail On Sunday

Paperback - Harpercollins

A Killing Kindness
When Mary Dinwoodie is found choked in a ditch following a night out with her boyfriend, a mysterious caller phones the local paper with a quotation from Hamlet.
The career of the Yorkshire Choker is under way.
If Detective-Superintendent Dalziel is unimpressed by the literary phone calls, he's downright angry when Sergeant Wield calls in a clairvoyant.
Linguists, psychiatrists, mediums - it's all a load of bloody nonsense as far as he's concerned, designed to make fools of him and his department. And meanwhile the Choker strikes again - and again…
"One of the modern masters of the police procedural' Susanna Yager, Sunday Telegraph
`Celebrated for putting a spin on the classic murder mystery' Peter Guttridge, Independent
'Reginald Hill's stories must certainly be among the best now being written, and with each successive book he seems to be widening his range' Times Literary Supplement
'All the fun of the fair and the fizz of the fuzz… Spin-drier revolutions before a plausible motive takes shape' The Observer

First British Edition Collins (1979)

Pascoe's Ghost
and Other Brief Chronicles of Crime
Murder is the main ingredient in Reginald Hill's first volume of short stories, but theft, extortion and rape all figure in these brief chronicles of crime, the moods of which range from the merry to the macabre. As usual, the two stories featuring those ill-matched mid-Yorkshire detectives, Inspector Pascoe and Superintendent Dalziel, run the whole gamut.
In Pascoe's Ghost, the inspector finds himself in Poe country, investigating the fate of a woman who hasn't been seen by a soul for a year - unless you count her brother, who claims her ghost is haunting him. The trail leads to a storm-racked country churchyard at midnight, with Pascoe convinced the case needs an exorcist as much as a policeman.
In Dalziel's Ghost, the fat super who normally wouldn't be seen dead in a graveyard also expresses a hitherto unsuspected interest in the supernatural, though it's Pascoe who gets the Gothic end of the stick.
In both stories things are not always as they seem. Nor are they, for example, in the professor's farewell speech in The Rio de Janeiro Paper, nor in the prisoner's diary in Exit Line, nor in the padlocked contents of The Trunk in the Attic.
The one thing the reader can rely on is the excellence of Reginald Hill's writing, and the entertainment he lavishly provides.