I might give this one another chance someday, but I'm not too sure about that. I could barely stand reading the first handful of pages. YAWN.

Another entertaining, complex Dalziel and Pascoe novel. This time the literary hook is the relatively obscure Romantic poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, and we have an engaging bit of academic skulduggery involving competing biographies. A small irritation is that neither the author nor the publisher has bothered to get a native speaker to check the little bits of German that are scattered throughout the text, leaving a number of annoying little typos. Not very professional.

Something to be aware of is that, whilst most of the D&P novels are essentially self-contained, this one follows closely on from Dialogues of the Dead — in essence, it's a reopening of that case — so, especially if you are obsessive about spoilers, make sure you've read the earlier book first. Franny Roote and Rye Pomona are both back as central characters. Parts of the book are set in Sheffield and at "Estotiland", a thinly disguised version of Meadowhall, which gives Hill the chance for a few entertaining little digs at South Yorkshire.

Hmm: Dialogues of the Dead, Death's Jest-book, The Death of Dalziel,A Cure for all diseases — is it just me, or do you get the feeling that Hill is getting a bit morbid in his old age? Obviously, you can't write murder mysteries without bringing death into them somewhere, but in this book it becomes a fairly central theme. ( )