Showing results by author "Reginald Hill" in All Categories

Wolf Hadda's life was a fairytale - successful businessman and adored husband. But a knock on the door one morning ends it all. Universally reviled, thrown into prison, Wolf retreats into silence. Seven years later Wolf begins to talk to the prison psychiatrist and receives parole to return home. But there's a mysterious period in Wolf's past when he was known as the Woodcutter. Now the Woodcutter is back, looking for truth and revenge...

A sweltering summer spells bad news for the private detective business. Thieves and philanderers take the month off and the only swingers in town are the ones to be found on the 19th hole of the Royal Hoo Golf Course. The civilized reputation of the 'Hoo' is in trouble, however. Shocking allegations of cheating have been directed at one of its leading members, Chris Porphyry. When Chris turns to Joe Sixsmith, PI, he's more than willing to help - well, he hasn't got any other clients.

Like father like son....But heredity seems to have gone a gene too far when Pal Maciver's suicide in a locked room exactly mirrors that of his father 10 years earlier. In each case, accusing fingers point towards Pal's stepmother, the beautiful, enigmatic Kay Kafka. But she turns out to have a formidable champion: Mid-Yorkshire's own super-heavyweight, Detective Superintendent Andrew Dalziel.

Convalescing in Sandytown, Dalziel befriends Charlotte Heywood who is researching the benefits of alternative therapy. With much in common, the two soon find themselves in league when trouble comes to town. Sandytown's principal landowners have grandiose plans for the resort -- none of which they can agree on. One of them has to go, and when one of them does, in spectacularly gruesome fashion, DCI Peter Pascoe is called in to investigate -- with Dalziel and Charlotte providing unwelcome support.

Who would sever a tongue from a living mouth? Or kill a pathetic, homeless old man? Or frighten a young doctor into silence? The questions are piling up, and Doug McHarg can't stop asking them - especially when he's warned off by both his boss in the local police and by Scotland Yard. The pattern that emerges is of a powerful organisation with links to the throne and the White House. And all that stands against them is McHarg: a discontented copper with nothing to lose.

For years, the Stranger House has stood in the village of Illthwaite, offering refuge to travellers. People like Sam, a brilliant young mathematician, who believes that anything that can't be explained by maths isn't worth explaining. And Miguel, a historian running from a priests' seminary, who sees ghosts. Sam is an experienced young woman, Miguel a 26-year-old virgin.

Caught in the blast of a huge Semtex explosion, the only things preventing Superintendent Andy Dalziel from stepping through Death's door might be his own size and indomitable willpower. As he lies on a hospital bed, it falls on DCI Peter Pascoe to seek justice for Andy. The security services have written it off as an accident: the terrorist suspects have paid for their clumsiness with their lives. Who, then, are the Knights Templar, a shadowy group exacting summary public justice on their enemies?

It starts with a phone call to Superintendent Dalziel from an old friend asking for help. But where it ends is a very different story. Gina Wolfe has come to Mid-Yorkshire in search of her missing husband, believed dead. Her fiance, Commander Mick Purdy of the Met, thinks Dalziel should be able to take care of the job. What none of them realize is how events set in motion decades ago will come to a violent head on this otherwise ordinary summer's day.

Three times Detective Chief Inspector Pascoe has wrongly accused dead-pan joker Franny Roote. This time he's determined to leave no gravestone unturned as he tries to prove that the ex-con and aspiring academic is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But over his investigation looms the huge form of Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel.