On Beulah Height (Dalziel & Pascoe, Book 15)

Andy Dalziel, back at work after a long convalescence, is finding it harder to get back in the swing than he anticipated. It doesn’t help when he manages to skip a day and sets out for a Monday morning meeting on Sunday. So when old acquaintance Commander Mick Purdy of the Met asks him to help Gina Wolfe, who has come to Mid-Yorkshire in search of a husband missing for seven years, he is glad of what seems like a harmless diversion to get his hand back in.

But things soon start getting serious. Gina’s husband was a DI under strain after the death of their young daughter and under suspicion after serious leaks from a case he was working. Is he in fugue, or is he in flight? Or was he simply removed from command by the subject of the enquiry, entrepreneur Goldie Gidman, who has worked his way up from East End loan shark to City financier. A major political contributor and father to a rising young MP, Gidman himself is under the scrutiny of a left-wing tabloid journalist. And up in Yorkshire, Gina is being shadowed by two ruthless henchman from Gidman’s past.

Taking place within the space of a single October Sunday and alternating between mid-Yorkshire and London, Midnight Fugue is a complex, action-packed, page-turning story that builds to a dramatic conclusion and one last surprise.

In a stand-alone psychological thriller from acclaimed mystery master Reginald Hill, a mysterious ex-con returns to his remote childhood home on a deadly hunt for revenge. Combining the chilling atmospheres of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs, the narrative ingenuity of P.D. James’s The Private Patient, and the compelling characterizations of Hill’s own Dalziel and Pascoe series, Hill delivers a frightful, fast-paced study of suspense at its most sinister in The Woodcutter.