Reginald Hill - Death's Jest Book Reginald Hill's best-selling duo, Dalziel and Pascoe, return in this brilliant, complex and ultimately moving crime novel: 'Reginald Hill is probably the best living crime writer in the English-speaking world' -- Independent In T.L. Beddoes' play Death's Jest-Book, the dead won't lie still in the grave and the living often wish they could. And Reginald Hill's novel is much the same -- except perhaps for a few more jests. The dead-pan joker, Franny Roote, is working on his dead friend's unfinished biography of Beddoes, and with unfinished business between himself and DCI Pascoe to deal with as well.
While recovering in hospital, Inspector Morse comes across an account of the investigation into a murder from 1849, a crime for which two people were hanged. When he is discharged he can prove that they were convicted wrongly.
American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century
It was an explosion that reverberated across the country—and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air.
On a beautiful summer day, crowds lined up outside a theater witness a sudden act of extreme road rage: a tap on a fender triggers a nearly homicidal attack. Jackson Brodie, ex-cop, ex-private detective, new millionaire, is among the bystanders.The event thrusts Jackson into the orbit of the wife of an unscrupulous real estate tycoon, a washed-up comedian, a successful crime novelist, a mysterious Russian woman, and a female police detective. Each of them hiding a secret, they all play a role in driving Jackson out of retirement and into the middle of several mysteries that intersect in one sinister scheme.
A fresh analysis of both the hidden and explicit philosophical ideas to be found in crime literature Josef Hoffmann covers influences and inspirations in crime writing with references to a stellar cast of crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Dashiell Hammett, Albert Camus, Borges, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Ted Lewis. Hoffmann examines why crime literature may provide stronger consolation for readers than philosophy. In so doing, he demonstrates the truth of Wittgenstein's claim that more wisdom is contained in the best crime fiction than in philosophical essays.
