On Beulah Height - Softcover

Hill, Reginald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0440225906 ISBN 13: 9780440225904

Publisher: Dell Pub Co, 1999

Synopsis

Into thin air...

Three little girls, one by one, had vanished from the farming village of Dendale. And Superintendent Andy Dalziel, a young detective in those days, never found their bodies--or the person who snatched them. Then the valley where Dendale stood was flooded to create a reservoir, and the town itself ceased to be . . . except in Dalziel's memory.

Twelve years later, the threads of past and present are slowly winding into a chilling mosaic. A drought and dropping water table have brought Dendale's ruins into view. And a little girl has gone missing from a nearby village. Helped by Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, an older, fatter, and wiser Dalziel has a second chance to uncover the secrets of a drowned valley. And now the identity of a killer rests on what one child saw . . . and what another, now grown, fears with all her heart to remember . . . .

About this title

Review:

‘Hill is among the most entertaining and invigorating detective novelists writing at present’
TLS

‘Read him’
London Review of Books

From the Back Cover:

They'd moved everyone out of Dendale that long hot summer fifteen years ago. They needed a new reservoir, and an old community seemed a cheap price to pay. They even dug up the dead and moved them too.

But four inhabitants of the dale they couldn't move, for nobody knew where they were. Three little girls who'd gone missing, and the prime suspect in their disappearance, Benny Lightfoot.

This was Andy Dalziel's worst case and now fifteen years on he looks set to relive it. It's another long hot summer. A child goes missing in the next valley, and as the Dendale reservoir waters shrink and the old village re-emerges from the depths, old fears and suspicions arise too as someone sprays the deadly message on the wall of the small town of Danby.

Myth and music mingle as the Mid-Yorkshire team delve deep into the past and into their own reserves of experience and endurance in search of answers which threaten to bring more pain than they resolve.

Reginald Hill has a reputation for faultless writing, sparkling wit, and sharply observed characterization, but with 'On Beulah Height' he has surpassed himself. Imbued with a sense of devastating loss, leavened by unquenchable humour and spirit, it is his most haunting novel yet.

The Dalziel and Pascoe novels have now been adapted into a successful BBC television series.

'Their (Dalziel and Pascoe's) double act...is one of the delights of English crime fiction'
MARCEL BERLINS, 'The Times'

'This is as good as the English detective novel gets'
GQ

'Hill's wit is the constant, ironic foil to his vision, and to call this a mere crime novel is to say Everest is a nice little hill'
FRANCES HEGARTY, 'Mail on Sunday' (of 'The Wood Beyond')

'Reginald Hill is among the most entertaining and invigorating detective novelists writing at present'
PATRICIA CRAIG, 'TLS'

'Retire Morse and hire any deft whodunnit by Reginald Hill'
BOYD TONKIN, 'Independent'

'The finest male English contemporary crime writer. Compassionate, intelligent and entertaining'
VAL MCDERMID, 'Manchester Evening News'

About this edition

• Publisher: Dell Pub Co
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0440225906
• ISBN 13: 9780440225904
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback