| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in The Wood Beyond (Dalziel & Pascoe Novel) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
‘These novels last, like a grand malt whisky’
Mail on Sunday
‘One of Britain’s most consistently excellent crime novelists’
The Times
‘One of the masters of the modern police procedural’
Sunday Telegraph
Product Description
‘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 little hill’ Frances Hegarty, Mail on Sunday
A ravaged 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 wartorn woods in search of his great-grandfather who fought and died in Passchendaele.
Seeing the wood for the trees is the problem for Andy Dalziel when he finds himself fancying an animal rights activist, depite her possible complicity in a murderous assault and her appalling taste in whisky.
A mind-bending puzzle leading us on the wild side of the pastoral.
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
This is an ambitious work; Hill clearly intends to transcend the police procedural genre, and includes a parallel story set in the ghastly killing fields of Passchendaele in the Great War that dovetails with the present-day police investigation that is the nominal subject of the book. It must be said that the interwoven story of Pascoe's ancestor (who shares his name) strains credulity; it's a literary construct that doesn't really come off.
But who cares? Hill as a writer is otherwise at the top of his game. It's full of witty dialogue (if only people in life -- myself included -- could set off such a string of verbal firecrackers, how much more entertaining our daily round would be!). Dalziel's Yorkshire dialect is a constant source of delight: I hope expressions like "nowt," "tha's," "lass," et al. aren't dying out. And as usual, the characters, especially the detectives and Pascoe's wife Ellie, are drawn in psychological depth.
The novel can be enjoyed as pure entertainment. But, notwithstanding the parallel story's unlikelihood, it offers a window into the ungodly horrors of life in the trenches in 1917 and the savagery of military "justice" in the British army of the time.
Author Reginald Hill is as skilled as they come in creating colorful characters and intricate and multidimensional plots. "The Wood Beyond" has both in spades, but particularly a story line to rival the best of Hills' other work and far out in front of the average mystery potboiler. "The Wood Beyond" takes both Andy Dalziel and Peter Pascoe into deeply personal territory as the book examines a modern crime linked to a terrible injustice that took place before, during and after World War I. Indeed, Hill has laudably climbed on a soapbox here to once more expose in the most articulate way how senseless a slaughter that conflict it was.
"The Wood Beyond" gives the series principals Dalziel, Peter Pascoe, Ellie Pascoe, and Edgar Wield plenty of personal time while unwinding the mystery of a body found while animal rights activists are invading a medical research facility on a liberation mission. The story will eventually uncover corporate misdeeds, additional murders and mayhem and a major shock for DCI Pascoe relating to his family history.
This is one of Hill's best and mysteries don't get much better than that. Highly recommended.
I love the literary allusions and loved the relationship between Dalziel and Cap Marvell, despite her taste in whisky. Yes, the WW1 connections strain credulity, but this is a novel not non-fiction.
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
