Excellent Dalziel and Pascoe story about the24 hours on a Sunday before Dalziel comes back to active duty after convalescing from a serious head injury. Quoting from the book jacket: "A Welsh tabloid journalist senses the story he's been chasing for years may finally have landed in his lap. A Tory MP's secretary suspects her boss's father has an unsavory history that could taint his son's prime ministerial ambitions. The ruthless entrepreneur in question sends two henchmen out to make sure the past stays in the past. And the lethal pair dispatched have some awkward secrets of their own." There's much more to the interconnected stories but Hill artfully spins them out with a stunning end that in retrospect fits to a T. This book is hard to put down. ( )

Andy Dalziel has been over the Reichenbach Falls more often than most fictional detectives, but it's great that he's still going strong! This time, there's a visible shift in authority to Pascoe from Dalziel, but the dinosaur is by no means extinct. With any luck there will be a few more excursions for him yet before he's put on permanent display in the Yorkshire Museum...

This book is rather less playfully experimental in structure than most of the recent D&P novels, although Hill does make a brave attempt to disguise the rather standard multiple-point-of-view narrative by tying the psychiatric condition of fugue in with the musical form of the same name. This doesn't work very well as a metaphor: the structure of a written narrative can't imitate a musical fugue, because text is inherently a monophonic medium (you can only read one line of text at once). There is no such thing as counterpoint in prose. Hill tries to compensate for this by putting in precise time indications for each chapter, to define how they overlap, but it never becomes anything more than a gimmick.

It's a very good, well-built, character-driven detective story, with some jokes, some drama, some predictable and some very unexpected twists: certainly no reason to be disappointed, even if it's not quite as much fun as A cure for all diseases or Death's jest-book. ( )

One can never go wrong with Reginald Hill: like a modern male Agatha Christie, Hill has been delivering stunners for nearly 40 years with his popular police pairing Dalziel and Pascoe.

Midnight Fugue is their 24th outing and concentrates on a day in the life of ‘Fat Andy’ who – after a near-death experience and a long convalescence – is battling to reassert his authority over his staff.

Missing people mysteriously reappearing, murder, politics, mayhem, powerful untouchables, revenge, and tabloid journalism come together to make an excellently written and exciting thriller. ( )

Andy Dalziel, recently returned to work after an extensive convalescence, wakes up late. In a panic that he will be late for the CID's monthly case review meeting, he dresses quickly, grabs his car keys and heads out the door. As he is leaving he hears his answer machine recording an incoming message from a DI he hasn't heard from for nearly a decade. In his haste to drive away he doesn't notice that he is being followed by another car. And behind that car is another.

By the time Dalziel gets into the centre of town he has realised that it is not Monday after all, that it is probably Sunday. He goes into the cathedral to confirm his suspicions, and that is when Gina Wolfe, wife of a DI who disappeared without trace nearly seven years earlier approaches him. Neither of them notice Vince Delay watching them.

Gina Wolfe has good reason for thinking her husband Alex may not be dead after all. At the time of his disappearance he was under investigation for corruption, taking handouts from criminal manipulator Goldie Gidman. But now someone has sent her a newspaper clipping which clearly shows her husband in the background crowd watching a minor Royal visiting the town.

Taking Gina's investigation on, unofficially at first, is very important to Fat Andy who is desperate to prove that he is not only fit and well, but still at the height of his powers. In the period since he was blown up in DEATH OF DALZIEL and convalesced in A CURE FOR ALL DISEASES, Peter Pascoe has led the team, and proved pretty well he can manage without Dalziel. Followers of the Dalziel and Pascoe series have been waiting to see if Fat Andy is able to come back to work, or whether he will stand down and hand over to Pascoe. This is #24 in the Dalziel and Pascoe series. The series began nearly 40 years ago with A CLUBBABLE WOMAN in 1970. Check the full list at Fantastic Fiction.

The structure of MIDNIGHT FUGUE is interesting to say the least. As we have come to expect, Hill plays little games with his readers. First of all there is the fact the novel is divided up into five parts. Each part contains a line of music, each with a direction about how the music is to be played. Secondly, at the beginning of each section is a passage of two or three pages in italics, a "voice from without".
Finally Hill has sliced and diced the time frame within which the action takes place. The characters act independently within time frames that clearly overlap with each other. The reader is told with each new chapter what the precise time frame is. I suppose Hill could have left the reader to assume that the time frames overlap, but this structure seems to give the novel a precise timeline.

I got a little bit tired of the slice & dice effect to tell the truth, although I found it useful at the beginning. There were also plenty of clues related to the Alex Wolfe case, and about 50 pages from the end I thought I had it all sussed out. That was before Hill introduced the final element of the fugue.

I don't think MIDNIGHT FUGUE is Reginald Hill's best book. I haven't given it 5 like I did THE WOOD BEYOND, DEATH OF DALZIEL and A CURE FOR ALL DISEASES, but it is cleverly written, and an excellent read. ( )

This book is a definite slow burn but, it is well worth waiting for the Roman Candle that bursts forth at its conclusion.
Dalziel has returned from being blown up at the end of the dynamic duo's last adventure but, he has returned to work earlier than recommended. In his absence, Pascoe has blossomed into the leader and the main question during this novel, all of which takes place within a day, is, will Dalziel rest control back from his side kick?
Without giving anything away, the story is cleverly constructed in that, all the clues are introduced at an early stage but, I was fooled into missing their significance until the denouement. An excellent read ( )