Three men in their seventies die on the same winter’s evening. One is murdered in his bath, the second dies of exposure on a playing field, the third is run down on his bicycle. It’s up to Pascoe to suss out what has happened to them, though only one of them is really his case. And Andy Dalziel is muddled up in one of the deaths and behaving decidedly furtively about it.

I thought this was a pretty good story though it took a while for me to get the three separate incidents being investigated straight in my head.

I like the way Hill weaves in parts of his detectives lives with the themes in his tales. This book has a lot to say about the care of the elderly and this is reflected in Ellie Pascoe’s parents problems as her father begins to show signs of senile dementia.

The story telling is, as ever, excellent, but I think Hill is beginning to really pick up at about this point in the series and I think the later books are just going to get better until I get back to where I started at the first Hill book I read, On Beulah Height.

[This is book 8 in the Dalziel & Pascoe series]