Good Morning, Midnight

I am truly sorry that I'm coming near the end of this wonderful series. Dalziel and Pascoe are wonderful characters, and together they make a formidable detective team. Each brings their own strengths to each investigation, and they play off each other wonderfully. This book though is really all Pascoe! He has been trying to make sense of what looks like a suicide, but because there are too many unanswered questions he decides to investigate it. This puts him at odds with Dalziel because one of the principals in this so-called case is a close friend of Andy's. Pascoe finds himself tiptoeing around trying not to raise the bear from his den. And of course there is Wieldy. He is my favourite character, and he plays a very important role here. The book has many of Hill's trademarks- intelligent writing, humour, tight plot and a writing style that is elegant and eloquent. For those who love well-written detective stories the Dalziel and Pascoe series cannot be beat.

I was glad to see this book come out and even happier to read it. The past few Reginald Hill books in the Dalziel and Pascoe series have been entirely too cerebral for a simple sot like me and I started to actually resent Reginald Hill for ramming home his blinding intellect so fiercely. He must have gotten that out of his system, because in "Good Morning, Midnight", we have a really nifty, twisty mystery with the usual great attraction/avoidance between our beloved inspectors Dalziel and Pascoe. This doesn't mean that Hill deprives us of Dalziel's fantastically literate musings (and I'm sure I only "get" a small percentage of these) but they aren't the centerpiece. The story is. And there is nothing so delicious as a good old-fashioned "body in the library" mystery with lots of nasty family members involved. It is even better when the ugliness goes back a few generations and we get an intriguing backstory as a result. I still wish Ellie Pascoe would get a life and that Dalziel's love life would pick back up again, but that might have made too weighty and dense a story. In truth, this one was just right.

In my view, Reginald Hill is the most literate and witty of all current writers of police procedurals. Dalziel and Pascoe are a great pair as the gruff bearlike Dalziel plays off "college boy" Pascoe. Gay Sgt Weld and PC Shirley Novello round out the team as they unravel a complex plot. Each of the numerous players here is a distinct and memorable personality. Highly recommended.

British award-winner Hill delivers another witty and delightful Dalziel and Pascoe novel, his 21st. An irascible force of nature, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel seems uncharacteristically incurious about the peculiar suicide of antiques dealer Pal Maciver, ordering Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe to write it off without further investigation. Which Pascoe would have been inclined to do - room locked from the inside, toe through shotgun trigger guard - but for Dalziel's suspicious complacency. Now, the reader knows, as the police do not, that Maciver went to considerable trouble to stage his suicide as a murder, framing his hated stepmother, and that only careful investigation would turn up the clues he had planted. His suicide is a replica of his father's a decade before, right down to the volume of Emily Dickinson poems open on his desk. These were a favorite of the American stepmother, Kay, now Kafka, married to Tony Kafka, head of the munitions company that swallowed the Maciver family business all those years ago. It's Kay whom Dalziel seems to be protecting, an enigma who may be as calculating as she is beguiling, though she has the fat man's total confidence. Point of view switches among the various members of the police team (though never Dalziel; that would blunt his mystique), the family, and the spooks surrounding Kafka's business. The plot thickens as it goes, the by-play among the cops remains witty and shrewd (vaguely like a British version of McBain's 87th precinct), the characters' interactions are complex and satisfyingly underhanded and Hill delivers a sharp twist at the end that settles some questions while raising a host of new ones. Another winner from a writer who just keeps getting better.

A decade ago a man committed suicide in the Moscow House in Yorkshire. Now his son Pal Maciver kills himself in the same place in the same manner while his spouse Sue Lynn was playing patient-doctor in the bed of her lover Tom Lockridge. Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel and Detective Chief Inspector Peter Pascal head the inquiries into what is obvious, a locked door suicide. As the police investigate, Andy seems to be thinking with his wrong head as he appears to compromise the case by his relationship with Kay Kafta, widow of Maciver the father and stepmother to Maciver the son. Even stranger is that Andy led the inquiries into the father's suicide. As the international corporate world and government spies intersect the investigation, Peter worries that Andy is covering up the working of a killing feline due to desire for the merry widow. GOOD MORNING, MIDNIGHT is an entertaining Dalziel and Pascal police procedural more for their battling (seem like a married couple) than the actual investigation. Peter is very concerned that Andy has stepped over the ethics line to protect Kay and wonders if the DS did the same ten years ago. This is a terrific British cop series with the investigations always fun to follow, but this time especially pleasurable is when the lead couple fuss, fight, and fume. Harriet Klausner