Fat Andy "half in love with easeful death"? Not bloody likely!

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	• Death Comes for the Fat Man (Dalziel and Pascoe Mysteries) Reginald Hill Harper, 2008 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 29 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great read

I enjoyed this book very much. I have a decent vocabulary and found myself looking up words frequently. Not usually true in a "mystery". I think, to really enjoy this to the fullest, one should be familiar with the series to understand the relationships. This series in one of my very favorites, for its plot, writing and humor. Love the characters.

You can't have one without the other.

This is another strong entry in this wonderful series, but with Dalziel lying comatose in a hospital bed throughout the book, it was a strictly Pascoe show. Pascoe finds himself alone against the whole world of "spooks" as he tries to find out who set the bomb that may have killed Dalziel, and as he digs, he finds that the leads he's following tie into the home team and the secrets run deep, and he knows he's got a "fox in the henhouse". That person inside the anti-terrorism unit is working with the "Templar" vigilantes who are trying to eliminate all Arabs from English soil. I was very afaid to begin this book because I absolutely love Andy Dalziel's character, and it looked like book number 21 was going to be the end of this wonderful detective team. I will leave it there and it's up to you to read the book to see if that is the case, and to follow Pascoe on his wild and wooly chase against unseen enemies. This is, bar none, the best detective team in the fiction genre.

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Fat Andy "half in love with easeful death"? Not bloody likely!

Reginald Hill is a highly-skilled wordsmith and Fat Andy Dalziel (a name pronounced, of course, in no rational manner) is so strong a character that there is always some joy to be found in one of Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe novels.

Not all D&P books are of equal joy, however. Dalziel is always an appealing and appalling delight but Pascoe, his junior partner in the series, is correspondingly and even insistently bland. Worse, he is married to Ellie, one of the most singularly dreary female characters in all of literature, a feminine blight almost as horrendous as the ghastly Susan Whats'ername in the American Spenser series.

"Death Comes for the Fat Man" has its virtues but, as Dalziel is effectively out of the main lines of the plot and action, lying in a coma, the story is perforce carried by Pascoe. And yes, in the absence of his coarse, blustering, overweight mentor, Bland Peter assumes some of Dalziel's characteristics out of sheer reaction, but it's a matter of too little and too late. And--could it be doubted?--Ellie inevitably rushes in to fill the vacuum of Fat Andy's absence, not so much in wordage as in her sheer, glum, annoying, whining, fault-finding, grumbling, unsupportive, unforgiving presence.

Hill is a highly successful commercial commodity. I think it is safe to assume that his publishers are so happy to have his name on a manuscript that they have foresworn such trifles as editing to tighten up his work or suggesting that his plot devices are downright idiotic. The particular idiocy in this book is in the author's choice of villains: a coven of right-wing, murderous prats who fancy themselves the Knights Templars reborn while messily doing away with British Moslems who have incurred their knightly ire for one reason or another. That even Hill is unable to take them seriously is evident in his comparisons of them to the boys' school desperados of Kipling's "Stalky & Co."

Hill is also back on one of his hobby-horses, an old favorite that has turned up with increasing frequency in his more recent books: the deviousness, duplicity and sheer dangerousness of the right-wingers who run Britain's security services. Ha, considering the track record of those services, such a vision of their competence is one that only a dedicated and terminally fretful left-winger could hold.

Despite the faults of "Death Comes for the Fat Man," Reginald Hill is still enough of a writer to make it worthwhile for a reader to put down a couple of dollars for the privilege of reading his book. The book's good enough, but it certainly is no equal to the earlier and much tighter members of the series. I give it four weak stars.

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Pascoe Solo

While the famous duo have entertained millions for a long time, I found it a pleasant relief to read a story where Pascoe was the central character, not the "sidekick" of the dominant Dalziel. Didn't miss the Fat Man one bit.

Can't have One without the Other

Love the normal contretemps between Dalziel and Pascoe in other novels. It's hard to get totally immersed here without Dalziel whipping out the goodies. None of the other characters play well without him and noone can replace his, "elephant in the livingroom" presence no matter how hard they try. I find Ellie irritating instead of entertaining. She still doesn't get what Pascoe does for a living. But it did give Pascoe his, "hour upon the stage". Let's hope he wont have to do it again.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Not for a second did Pascoe admit the possibility of death. Dalziel was indestructible. Dalziel is, and was, and forever shall be, world without end, amen . . .

Chief constables might come and chief constables might go, but Fat Andy went on forever.

Barreling his way into an investigation of possible terrorist activities, Superintendent Andy Dalziel is caught in the blast of a huge explosion at a video shop?and only "Fat Andy's" considerable bulk prevents his colleague, Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, from suffering a similar fate. Now Dalziel lies on a hospital bed barely clinging to life, while Pascoe remains determined to find those responsible.

But the truth is not always cut-and-dried, and sometimes those who are sworn to terror's destruction are even more dangerous than the foe they wish to annihilate.

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