BONES AND SILENCE

Yorkshire police duo Supt. Andrew Dalziel and Insp. (now Chief Insp.) Peter Pascoe (Ruling Passion, Underworld) puzzle over a simple-seeming domestic murder—in a grimly witty tale bound to raise Hill's considerable reputation to new heights. Dalziel, a muddled witness to the killing of next-door neighbor Gall Swain, rushes over to her house to find her husband Philip and her lover Greg Waterson with the body. Both men testify that Gall was depressed, strung-out, and bent on suicide; Philip had accidentally killed her trying to wrestle the gun away. But that isn't what Dalziel saw, and his doubts, intensified when Waterson calmly disappears from a hospital bed minutes after leaving his statement, lead the department along a trail from Swain's fanatically religious business partner Arnie Stringer and his drab daughter Shirley Appleyard (what's become of the wastrel seducer her father forced to marry her?) to Waterson's unhappily estranged wife Pamela (has she been under her husband's orders to steal drugs from the hospital where she's a nurse?)—with casually mordant detours into a series of gang beatings (whose latest victim is gay Sgt. Wield) and hints of skullduggery at Swain & Stringer's latest building project: a new garage for the police department. Hill signals his serious intentions from the outset with a subplot—Dalziel is shanghaied into playing God to Swain's Lucifer in dazzling Eileen Chung's presentation of medieval mystery plays, while Pascoe tries to figure out who's been sending Dalziel letters threatening suicide. But Hill doesn't really need the subplot to give the relation between Swain and Dalziel as his nemesis depth or resonance, because the events that unmask Swain are quietly, cumulatively hair-raising all by themselves. Hill's most ambitious Dalziel/Pascoe novel yet—and one whose humor, keenness, and insight place him securely in the company of Ruth Rendell and P.D. James, and well ahead of most of their recent work.