What a delight to find that Reginald Hill has lost none of his touch. Over a 24-hour timespan, Mr Hill confidently plays us his four-part fugue - "Bit of a tune that chases itself round and round til it vanishes up its own a..hole", as Dalziel puts it - and brings it to a resolution that in hindsight, like all the best music, suddenly makes perfect sense. The scored theme from the "Art of Fugue" at the beginning of each section of the book tells us something about Mr Hill's inspiration, and Bach might well have been proud to be this book's implicit dedicatee.
While Mr Hill exercises his technical skill, he shows he's lost none of his humour: there are awful puns, a Welsh village with the shamelessly Dylanesque name of Llufwwadog, and of course Fat Andy's Rabelaisian bawdiness and gluttony. And Mr Hill continues to prolong the tension which has built up over the last few books between the (not-quite-so-young-these-days) challenger Peter Pascoe and the ageing lion Dalziel - a tension which has not yet broken, and which hints at more books to come. Hurrah!
(PS: my wife asks me to say that she's glad there's so little of Ellie in the book; for my part, I'm glad not to see the awful Franny Roote!)
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