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Saturday, October 04, 2008

Exit Lines

Hill, Reginald. Exit Lines. This is the 8th of the Dalziel & Pascoe mysteries and continues to develop Hill's characters and his style. I still need to pick up numbers 3-7, but by this book, the close if sometimes testy, relationship between Dalziel and Pascoe is well established.

Three old men die on a cold November night. One was hit by a car in which Andy Dalziel was a passenger. Or was Andy driving? He had certainly been drinking. Peter Pascoe is involved in the case of the elderly man who was murdered in his bath tub, but his concerns and his doubts about the case involving Dalziel keep him in turmoil.

One element of this novel is the treatment of the elderly, and Hill examines it in all three of the murder cases, as well as in the situation involving Ellie Pascoe's father who is showing signs of dementia.

Hill has left the flaws of A Clubbable Woman far behind by this 8th novel in the series. In fact, he had left solved some of the major problems by the second novel in the series.

Fiction. Mystery. 1984. (recently republished with much better cover than the one I have) 255 pages.

5 comments:

  1. Do you know, I don't think I've read this one. Off to the library right now to see if I can pick up a copy.

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  2. Ann - If you don't find a copy, let me know, and I'll send you the copy I got from Alibris.

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  3. Thanks, how kind, but the library has a copy. They're sending for it for me.

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  4. That's it, I'm ordering the first and second today so I can begin! I've been saying I was going to in comments to you, and now I'm doing it! Thanks Jenclair (is that the right way to write your name?)

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  5. Nan - Remember that the first one is not great, the second is much better, but the final ones in this long series are wonderful!

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