On Beulah Height by
Reginald Hill
hbk out February 98
Published by HarperCollins
at £16.99
Fifteen years ago, in a long, hot summer, they drowned Dendale to make a reservoir. They pulled down the village in the little valley and they moved the dead from the churchyard. But perhaps not all the dead. During the last months of the village’s life, three little girls went missing. So too did Benny Lightfoot, the shy, strange youth who everyone believed had taken the girls. But no one knows for sure. None of the four was found.
Now, in another hot summer, the reservoir shrinks. One by one the bones of the old village are revealed. Another little girl goes missing from Danby in the next valley, where most of the former inhabitants of Dendale now live. On the walls of Danby someone sprays a message: BENNY’S BACK.
So too are Mid Yorkshire’s CID. Andy Dalziel has a fifteen-year-old defeat to avenge. DC Shirley (“Ivor”) Novello is aching to prove her professional capabilities. Sergeant Wield does not allow his new-found domestic bliss to distract him from an investigation which needs both his meticulous attention to detail and his compassion. Peter Pascoe, on the other hand, has a problem much closer home - perhaps the worst crisis of his life.
ON BEULAH HEIGHT shows the full range of Hill’s talents: the wit, the wickedly skilful plotting, the social commentary and the sympathetic but always shrewd characterisation. But lingers most of all, however, is the novel’s enormous emotional impact. Its underlying theme is how parents react to the loss of children. Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder - Songs for Dead Children - run as a sombre leitmotif through the storyline. In more ways than one, the songs are sung in a broad Mid-Yorkshire accent. This review was first published in the Independent, January 1998
(
Andrew Taylor
- author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)
On Beulah Height by
Reginald Hill