Review by New York Times Review
Reginald Hill, that most playful of genre authors, fancies himself a latter-day Jane Austen in THE PRICE OF BUTCHER'S MEAT (Harper, $26.95), an English mysteryof-manners set in Sandytown, a fictional resort on the Yorkshire coast, and satirizing inbred families obsessed with money and matrimony. Deploying a leisurelypaced epistolary style and a busy plot stuffed with dodgy inheritances, romantic mismatches and bountiful afternoon teas, Hill pulls off the clever literary jest of projecting Austen's unfinished novel "Sanditon" into modern times. But stretched out for more than 500 pages, the whimsy wears thin, reminding us that 19th-century novelists never had to contend with the inelegant stuttering of e-mail prose. After lying in a coma for much of "Death Comes for the Fat Man," the previous novel in this invigorating series, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel, head of the Mid-Yorkshire constabulary, takes his first steps back to health when he goes over the wall of a fancy convalescent home and totters into a local pub. Although he's quick to pick up on the byzantine affairs of the town's pre-eminent families, with their grandiose visions of developing Sandytown ("Home of the Healthy Holiday") into a tourist destination, Dalziel is too weak to get involved in the day-to-day skirmishes. Happily, the psychiatrist who runs the clinic asks him to keep "a sort of audio diary" on a digital recorder, which the garrulous detective names Mildred. Elsewhere in town, Charlotte Heywood, an engaging young lady of Janeite sensibilities, is busily sending saucy e-mail messages to her sister in Africa. Between Heywood and Dalziel, we get rather too much of the plot through inferior forms of communication. But once the first murder occurs, Hill gives the epistolary conceit a rest, slipping into the comfortable storytelling mode of the police procedural and broadening our view of the smoldering hostilities underneath the civilized social surface. Hill proves brilliant at recycling 19th-century characters and conventions - the gargoyle mistress of the manor, the feckless young heir, the penniless live-in relation, the family done out of its just inheritance - while gleefully adding macabre genre touches like a hog roast at which the pig is replaced by a dead body. What's this? A Jeffery Deaver novel with no mad-dog serial killer and no state-of-the-art technology to track his moves? Pinch me. But THE BODIES LEFT BEHIND (Simon & Schuster, $26.95) is no dream, only a different kind of nightmare - the elemental one of being hunted down in the wild like an animal. Brynn McKenzie, a sheriff's deputy in rugged Kennesha County, Wis., lands in this trap when she finds a high-powered lawyer and her social-worker husband shot to death in their isolated vacation house and their terrified guest, a chic city dweller named Michelle, cowering in the woods in her spike-heeled boots. Saddled with Michelle ("I'm really an actress"), Brynn is at a big disadvantage against two heavily armed hit men, hellbent on eliminating the only witness to the slaughter. Yet the resourceful deputy manages to make this a dead-even match, winning the creepy admiration of the lead killer. The meticulously structured plot moves back and forth between hunter and hunted, covering a big stretch of wild country. But although some of the near-miss encounters seem arbitrary, this is still a thrill-a-minute wilderness adventure. It's another dizzying tumble down the rabbit hole with Christopher Fowler in THE VICTORIA VANISHES (Bantam, $24), a continuation of the exploits of Arthur Bryant and John May, the oldest detectives on the London police force. As senior investigators in the Peculiar Crimes Unit, the partners are expected to attend to criminal matters that fall outside the norm, but Bryant's insistence that he saw a murder victim near a pub that doesn't exist (it was demolished in 1925) has the entire unit baffled. There's always a serious point to Fowler's drolly mannered mysteries, and here it's the future of London's historic drinking establishments - many of them visited in the course of this devious puzzle. If venerable pubs like the Victoria Cross can fall to "progress," what hope is there for beloved oddballs like Arthur Bryant or crackpot institutions like the P.C.U. - or all those other endangered monuments to England's fabled eccentricity? The dank and sweaty crime scenes in PARIS NOIR (Akashic, paper, $15.95) testify to the fact that the French invented "noir." Among the jarring images in this story collection (astutely edited by Aurélien Masson and translated by David Ball, Nicole Ball, Carol Cosman and Marjolijn de Jager), Didier Daeninckx's murky view of the after-hours scene in Porte Saint-Denis and Marc Villard's gritty look at the sex trade in Les Halles are correctives to all those persistent romantic fantasies about the city. But these grim realities could also do with a corrective, something along the lines of THE PARIS ENIGMA (Harper, $24.95). In this beguiling historical whodunit by the Argentine novelist Pablo De Santis, Paris is visited by Sigmundo Salvatrio, assistant to a founding member of an international association of top detectives, gathered in the city to illustrate their secret techniques and esoteric philosophies at the 1889 World's Fair. His enthusiasm undimmed, even when one of this august company is pushed off the Eiffel Tower, young Salvatrio sees Paris as others saw it at the time - the City of Light in an age of darkness. Reginald Hill's mystery of manners is set in Sandytown, a fictional resort on the Yorkshire coast.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
The title, from Jane Austen's Sanditon, is a nod to the novel's seaside resort setting, but Hill's language (much of it twentieth-first-century e-mail slang) has nothing to do with Austen's grace. Hill, who has received Britain's Golden Dagger Award and has written a long-running series starring two Yorkshire cops, Peter Pascoe and Andrew Dalziel, seems to be trying to update his police procedural style. The first half of this novel veers between e-mail epistolary and Pascoe's own interior monologue. Pascoe is at a seaside resort, recovering from severe injuries from a bomb. A great deal of his fragmented thoughts deal with the other denizens of the resort. The second half of the novel is a return to Hill's surer narrative voice, after the remains of one Lady Denham are discovered in a barbeque pit near Pascoe's resort. This brings in Dalziel and officialdom, with Pascoe adding his on-site observations. Uneven and a definite misstep in an otherwise outstanding series; for devoted fans.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Hill's solid 23rd Dalziel and Pascoe procedural set in Yorkshire, Det. Supt. Andy Dalziel doesn't see much ofÅhis longtime colleague, DCI Peter Pascoe, because Dalziel is recovering from the serious injuries he suffered in Death Comes for the Fat Man (2007) in the quiet resort of Sandytown. When the charred corpse of wealthy Lady Daphne Denham turns up in a revolving basket that had been used for a pig roast in Sandytown, the two policemen pursue largely independent investigations. Much of the background to Denham's demise comes from e-mails that in spots may puzzle those unfamiliar with e-mail jargon. More deaths follow before Hill offers a final twist that's unlikely to catch experienced genre readers by surprise. The crotchety Dalziel's chafing at the restrictions at the convalescent home where he's staying provides some amusing distraction from the somewhat leisurely crime solving. Newcomers might better start with earlier books in the series. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Since On Beulah Height, each entry in Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series has illustrated the British author's ever-growing creativity with language and genre. In this 23rd entry, Dalziel is recovering from injuries sustained in a bombing (Death Comes for the Fat Man) at a convalescent home in the seaside resort of Sandytown. Hill begins the story by having sections narrated by Dalziel, who has been given a voice recorder by his doctor, along with instructions to talk about his feelings and memories of the previous events. Email messages from a woman called Charley to her sister alternate with those passages. Circumstances bring Dalziel and Charley together, and in addition to a number of strange events and questionable characters, murder pays a visit, cueing the arrival of Pascoe and the others to investigate. The plot twists and turns at a dizzying pace. The blend of Dalziel's voice, Charley's grammatically challenged emails, and Hill's familiar, graceful prose and witty dialog all add to the effect. Someone new to the series will want to start with an earlier volume, but fans of Hill's work will certainly enjoy this latest ride.--Beth Lindsay, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
