Reginald Hill. Exit Lines (1984)

     Reginald Hill. Exit Lines (1984) One of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels, set about half-way through the series. Three elderly men die, one of them when he collides with Dalziel’s car (driven by a bookie friend, as Dalziel is drunk). Pascoe is assigned one death, and decides it’s suspicious. Two deaths are accidents, the third is murder.
     Hill’s vision too is dark and melancholy, but he lacks the elegiac tone of Burley’s books. His vision is more ironic: the murder was based on false impressions of available wealth, the accidental death was triggered by intermittent dementia and terror, and the reason for the apparent cover-up of Dalziel’s involvement in a road death was a deep cover anti-drug investigation. The TV series plays up the irony, and makes the fat man more of a jerk than he really is. Or maybe the Yorkshire accent makes anyone sound like a jerk. According to the date in the back, I had read this book last year, but nothing much stuck: it was as much fun the second time as the first. **½ .  (2008)