Is he or isn’t he?

Reginald Hill’s many readers may not trust the title, Super- intendent Andy Dalziel seeming to belong, like Captain Grimes, among the immortals.

Can the author really have brought him to his version of the Reichenbach Falls, and, if so, will the Fat Man no’, like Holmes, come back again? Certainly it seems that he is dead, blown up by a terrorist bomb in the first chapter, and, if not quite dead, then dying, despite the certainty of DCI Pascoe’s seven-year-old daughter Rosie that ‘Uncle Andy’ can’t do such a thing. While we wait to find out we are given quite a lot of his subconscious visions and out-of-body experiences; quite the worst thing in the novel, examples of the pretentious ‘fine writing’ which Hill is inclined to indulge in.

Dalziel therefore takes no part in the investigation, though his spirit pervades it, and Pascoe finds himself, to the worried irritation of his wife Ellie, speaking and acting as if he was Dalziel himself. This works rather well. If Pascoe isn’t as brutal or as funny as Dalziel, he is a more credible character than Dalziel has been for several books now, ever since Hill started treating him with sentimental indulgence.

The plot too is brisker and more convincing than in some of the recent novels. There’s no murderer playing elaborate word-games as in Death’s Jest-Book. It is far-fetched certainly, but possible, perhaps not even improbable.

Dalziel shouldn’t have approached the house. It had been ‘flagged up by CAT’, the ‘Combined Anti-terrorism unit in which Special Branch officers worked alongside MI5 operatives’. He did so principally because the alert had been given by Constable Hector, notoriously the dimmest officer in the Mid-Yorkshire force. At first CAT seem ready to write it off as an accident, but Pascoe is sure it’s more complicated.