Writing up notes on each book in this series is getting a bit pointless and probably pretty tedious for anyone reading. Hill’s a master storyteller and surprises me everytime with the inventiveness of not just his plots but of the way he narrates these stories.

I think this book draws a lot on Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities but I’m not qualified to comment on that angle. Pascoe stays in Mid-Yorkshire looking into a 1963 murder case. The surviving murderer has just been released from prison. Dalziel, who was a mere constable in the original case, takes off for New York and investigates the American side of the case. The American angle stops just short of turning into an outright comedy and Pascoe’s home end stops just short of turning into a full scale tragedy.

If I had to find a complaint to put to Hill it would be that he likes to tie up every single loose end in his plots and sometimes I feel it might be preferable to leave things dangling a little more. But that’s not really much of a complaint since many of the threads are only tied up for the reader and not for the police.