Dialogues of the Dead

New Dalziel and Pascoe novel from Britain's finest male crime writer: 'Reginald Hill stands head and shoulders above any other writer of homebred crime fiction' Tom Hiney, Observer A man drowns. Another dies in a motorbike crash. Two accidents ... yet in a pair of so-called Dialogues sent to the Mid-Yorkshire Gazette as entries in a short story competition, someone seems to be taking responsibility for the deaths. In Mid-Yorkshire CID these claims are greeted with disbelief. But when the story is leaked to television and a third indisputable murder takes place, Dalziel and Pascoe find themselves playing a game no one knows the rules of against an opponent known only as the Wordman.

Reginald Hill was brought up in Cumbria and has returned there after many years in Yorkshire. With his first novel, A Clubbable Woman, he was hailed as 'the crime novel's best hope' and twenty years on he has more than fulfilled that promise.