In Ruling Passion, by Reginald Hill, Pascoe and his girlfriend Ellie arrive in Thornton Lacey to spend a weekend with old friends from their student days. They find instead three of their friends dead of shotgun wounds, and a fourth friend at large, sought by the local police as a suspect in the killings. Meanwhile, back at home in Yorkshire, Dalziel wants Pascoe back to investigate a string of unsolved burglaries.

This is an earlier Pascoe and Dalziel mystery, and as with all of Hill’s novels in the series, both continuing characters and the ones brought in specifically for this mystery are finely detailed. Dalziel is Dalziel, bigger than life, insensitive, bigoted and politically incorrect as ever:

“I told you I belonged to the old school. There’s nowt wrong with a woman that can’t be cured by colour telly, wall-to-wall carpeting and a couple of rounds up the spout,” [Dalziel} said with exaggerated coarseness.

Ellie thought of kicking him in the crotch. Then she started laughing. She laughed so much that people turned and stared and the dogs in the nearby kennels started barking wildly as though in reply.

Pascoe, in the meantime, is hit with an emotional bomb – could his old university friend really be the killer? And was he getting more and more confused, or were the two investigations really starting to look linked in some way?

The mystery itself is complex, with lots of fun twists and potential suspects. The motive for the murders is perhaps not as credible as it could be, but Hill’s writing is as rich and intense as ever. The characters live and breathe, and the reader is drawn deep into Pascoe and Dalziel’s world. Even though this was a re-read for me, I was still caught by surprise – caught by each of the twists in the plot, in fact. Which is another reason I like to keep my Reginald Hill books, as I do re-read them, and do so with much pleasure.

Where to buy:

U.S. (Amazon.com)

Canada (Chapters)

UK (Amazon.co.uk)

Review copy details: published by Grafton, 1992, Mass market paperback , 301 pages

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