Bones and Silence (1990)
Blurb:
My review:
Although it won the Gold Dagger Award for the Best Crime Novel of the Year (1990), this is not very good. As a detective story, it disappoints, despite the profusion of plot strands, including Dalziel as witness to a “suicide,” Dalziel as recipient of mysterious suicide letters, and Dalziel as God in the Mystery Plays (“role-playing has an honourable history in psychological rehabilitation and what better way of coming to terms with guilt than exploring the greatest guilt of all?”)—Lucifer played by the chief suspect; the drug trade; football hooliganism; financial skulduggery; and missing people. Although it is slow-moving for the first two hundred pages, it picks up; and there is an ingenious hiding-place for a corpse. The murderer’s identity is obvious from the beginning, so there is little surprise at the end. This is balanced by the humour arising from the amusingly outrageous behaviour of the fat, coarse and very sharp Dalziel, and by the skilful way in which the Yorkshire Mystery Plays are linked with the murder case. Unfortunately the climax to which the book has been building falls remarkably flat, for we have no knowledge of the suicide’s character or past history.