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Upcoming screening for this powerful novel in the third major BBC drama series featuring Dalziel and Pascoe, the best detective duo in British crime writing.
This roots of the present-day mystery at a pharmaceutical research centre stretch back to the war-ravaged woods of the World War I Passchendaele campaign, taking the reader into fields where nothing can safely graze and no bird dares sing.
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‘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
"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, 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 whiskey.
'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 dare sing…
"This is as good as the English detective novel gets".
'GQ'
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.
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