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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
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.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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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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