Bones and Silence

⚖The case for it

Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series is the greatest British police procedural series of the 20th century. The fat, crude, brilliant Dalziel paired with his sensitive, literary DS Pascoe. In this entry, Pascoe directs a York Mystery Play production while investigating a murder. Hill brought real literary ambition to the procedural. Gold Dagger winner, 1990.

— the canon

✕The case against

Hill plants two plots and lets one starve the other. Dalziel witnesses a death and insists it was murder on stubbornness alone, while letters from an anonymous suicidal woman arrive between chapters, a tease the book strings out for four hundred pages before paying off with deliberate cruelty. The mystery-play business, Dalziel cast as God, is a joke Hill works too hard.

— the honest librarian