Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #70949 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-04
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
One of the things that the classic British crime novel does is set us puzzles; in Reginald Hill's new Dalziel and Pascoe novel Dialogues of the Dead they introduce us to a killer who does almost nothing else. A series of seemingly random killings are connected by the accounts of them--accounts awash in puns, literary allusions and deliberate obscurities--which keep turning up at the Mid-Yorkshire County Library. At first, keen young recruit Hat Bowler only takes the letters seriously as a way of chatting up the beautiful Rye Pomona--but it becomes progressively clearer to him and his superiors that whoever is writing them simply knows too much not to be the killer... Hill is at the height of his powers here--comic grotesques like Dalziel, with his habit of deliberately seeming more thuggish and obtuse than anyone could possibly quite be, compete for space with satiric observation of Jax, the bright young TV link who will do anything for her story, and the penny-pinching left-wing councillor who ends up with a chisel in his brain. Anyone who likes Hill's always excellent work will be impressed by this--and anyone who likes word-play and puzzles will be fascinated by it. --Roz Kaveney

Independent
"he is probably the best living male crime writer in the english speaking world"

The Times
"One of Britain's most consistently excellent crime novelists"

Customer Reviews

Hill, Puzzling but Back on Form
After being disappointed by Arms and The Woman I wasn't sure whether this would be any good. Luckily this is classic Hill, teasing and mentally challenging, threading themes and plot lines together effortlessly and really making the reader work hard.
Ellie is less to the fore in this book, which for me is a blessing. Here we have direct interaction into the mind of the killer without losing any of the suspense and tautness of plotting that HIll excels at. The characterisation, as ever, is fantastic.
This book should be read in partnership with Death's Jest Book as the stories intertwine. Fantastic.

Superb
I've always been a huge fan of the Dalziel and Pascoe books. Reginald Hill is a superb crime writer who has only got better with time. This is one of my favourite of the D&P series - it's intricately plotted but extremely gripping. The ending is not a complete surprise but Hill works up to the final conclusion neatly. All the linguistic stuff works brilliantly - it's clever and interesting.

Overall, I'd definitely recommend this book to anyone who likes quality crime fiction and especially any Dalziel and Pascoe fans.

Contrived, but a brilliant heading
I used to love Reggie Hill 10 or 15 years ago. I read a lot of his stuff when I lived in Australia, and his books were redolent of an England I'd left behind.

In recent years, however, I think he's started to disappear up his own arse with books that are frightfully clever, but too self-indulgent. And in many ways this is another example, with its confusing pseudo spiritual monologues and clever-clever word games central to the plot.

But the book achieves absolute redemption from the sheer brilliance of its ending (delivered, ironically, in another other-worldly epilogue!). It's so unexpected and unsettling that it ranks above the best two or three endings to any book I've ever read.