Bingeing on detective novels at the moment. Reginald Hill was a great writer, but his novels became more obscure and baroque as his career progressed. This is a mid-career book, I think possibly no.15, and I found this pretty difficult, but not as obscure as some of the later ones.
He is a good writer, Dalziel, Pascoe, his wife Ellie, and Wield are strong and well delineated characters who reappear in all the books and hold the plots together. But it is the wilful obscurity of the later plots that baffle me – this was followable (just) and well plotted but the number if tangential issues and the difficulty of following all of these was hard work.
A plot with too many offshoots (some leading nowhere) becomes unintelligible, or at least very hard work. It did make me think that formal verse/rhythmic structure of conventional poetry forces poets to choose and focus their choice of words very carefully, but maybe that is a poor analogy in relation to a novel.
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