Is he or isn’t he?

Reginald Hill’s many readers may not trust the title, Super- intendent Andy Dalziel seeming to belong, like Captain Grimes, among the immortals.

Can the author really have brought him to his version of the Reichenbach Falls, and, if so, will the Fat Man no’, like Holmes, come back again? Certainly it seems that he is dead, blown up by a terrorist bomb in the first chapter, and, if not quite dead, then dying, despite the certainty of DCI Pascoe’s seven-year-old daughter Rosie that ‘Uncle Andy’ can’t do such a thing. While we wait to find out we are given quite a lot of his subconscious visions and out-of-body experiences; quite the worst thing in the novel, examples of the pretentious ‘fine writing’ which Hill is inclined to indulge in.

Dalziel therefore takes no part in the investigation, though his spirit pervades it, and Pascoe finds himself, to the worried irritation of his wife Ellie, speaking and acting as if he was Dalziel himself.