On Beulah Height (1998)

Blurb:

My review:

Like the Kindertotenlieder running through the book, this is a passionate and heart-breaking novel—so beautiful it is painful and so painful it is beautiful.  It is real, so real, so dreadfully real to the truth about Men and Women (and children, too).  I swoon, swoon on my amaranthine couch, bestrewn with lilies, wafting their faint scent delicately into my imperial nostrils.  Enough, however, of this Suburban Literary Circle-type talk, which does the book no service.  Hill knows how to pull on the heart-strings, using a drowned village, lost children, lost innocence and lost hope, to achieve his purpose.  While it is very funny in parts, the humour serves only to emphasise the tragedy—yet, even in the darkest moments, an under-current of optimism runs through the novel.  Murderer(s), motive(s) and clues are chosen with an expert hand—powerful, tragic, ironic, they bear out the novel’s themes—deeply affecting and mind-blowing.  (And true; oh, deeply, passionately, true, true in a way so few novels are…)

To the Bibliography.

To the Reginald Hill Page.

To the Grandest Game in the World.

E-mail.