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Death's Jest-Book
by Reginald Hill
A review by Georgie Lewis
Reginald Hill's detecting duo, "Fat Andy" Dalziel and Peter Pascoe,
work together like Velcro. Dalziel's caustic (and frequently obscene) tongue and
overbearing character is the prickly stuff that binds with Pascoe's anxious and
tightly wound persona. Pascoe's perpetual disquietude also stems from an ongoing
obsession with an ex-prisoner, Franny Roote, that he put away years ago. Roote,
and his subsequent release from prison, has remained on the fringes of Pascoe's
mind, benign, obsequious, and just a little unsettling.
In Dialogues
of the Dead a series of seemingly unrelated deaths have one thing in common:
The description of the murders are written and discovered prior to the deaths,
and contain too much detail for anyone but the killer to know. Dialogues
of the Dead is filled with puns, literary allusions, and word games. Hill
is a well-educated mystery writer, and his ease with nineteenth-century Romantic
poetry, Greek tragedy, and etymology is as clear as his cheeky sense of humor.
As this magnificent mystery unfolds the reader is treated to one of the most
labyrinthine plots, and a truly astonishing climax.
But Dialogues is just the tip of the iceberg. Hill's follow-up, Death's
Jest-Book, plunges us deeper into this brilliant police procedural series.
Where Dialogues had Franny Roote hovering on the sidelines (but sustaining
Pascoe's paranoia at a slow simmer) Death's Jest-Book features Franny
in a major role, as he blithely writes Pascoe long, chatty letters about his
master's thesis research and his involvement with a semi-religious psychoanalytic
sect. All the while people are dying off around him, and frankly Franny is beginning
to worry that his study of T. L. Beddoe's poetry may be a factor.... Pascoe,
suffice to say, is nearly going mad. In the meantime crime waits for no man
— an inside tip from a rent boy is proving complicated in more ways than one,
and there is still a serial killer on the loose.
Reginald Hill has written many Dalziel and Pascoe novels, but Dialogues
of the Dead and Death's Jest-Book form a perfect introduction to
this master of British police procedural. While some authors' prolific output
or serialized characters can get stale over time, Hill is quite the opposite.
Here he is at the peak of his powers. And that peak is very high indeed.
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