The second book in the Dalziel and Pascoe series sends the two mismatched Yorkshire policemen among university students-a group for which Andy Dalziel has no great love. In fact, when he hears a dead body has been found on the grounds of Holm Coultram College, he thinks of it as a rather good start. This is 1971, and the police force does not enjoy the warmest of relations with the Ivory Tower. Nevertheless, Dalziel takes himself to college, where the single corpse is followed by another and then another, until even Dalziel is forced to admit that someone is going after the academic community with rather excessive zeal. As the investigation grows more complex, help arrives from some unexpected corners, Dalziel's callow young sergeant proves surprisingly insightful, and everyone involved gets some useful education....

It starts with a phone call to Superintendent Dalziel from an old friend asking for help. But where it ends is a very different story.

Gina Wolfe has come to mid Yorkshire in search of her missing husband, believed dead. Her fiancÉ, Commander Mick Purdy of the Met, thinks Dalziel should be able to take care of the job. What none of them realize is how events set in motion decades ago will come to a violent head on this otherwise ordinary summer's day.

A Welsh tabloid journalist senses the story he's been chasing for years may have finally landed in his lap. A Tory MP's secretary suspects her boss's father has an unsavory history that could taint his son's prime ministerial ambitions. The ruthless entrepreneur in question sends two henchmen out to make sure the past stays in the past. And the lethal pair dispatched have some awkward secrets of their own.

Four stories, two mismatched detectives trying to figure it all out, and twenty-four hours in which to do it: Dalziel and Pascoe are about to learn the hard way just how much difference a day makes.

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Felony & Mayhem's British category mystery...

A bomb couldn't kill Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel—but his convalescence at the Avalon Clinic in the quaint seaside resort of Sandytown ("Home of the Healthy Holiday") just might. Sneaking out to the local pub provides Fat Andy with a bit of necessary diversion, allowing him a pint or two on the sly, plus an update on the world of trouble outside the clinic—including the very different plans of a pair of powerful landowners for putting Sandytown more prominently on the map. But when a rather macabre murder calls Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe onto the scene, Fat Andy realizes that Avalon itself is no sanctuary from the lethal secrets of the local elite—or from the death tide that now, suddenly, is rising quite rapidly....

Molly Keatley is deeply contented with her life, her loving husband, her comfortable home in an attractive London suburb. Things are so pleasant, in fact, that they’re ever so slightly boring, but that changes abruptly one bright September morning, when her husband comes rushing home, mutters a hasty, unexplained apology . . . and disappears. Minutes later, two strange men arrive with news that her husband is in fact a Soviet spy, and that the sleepy joys of her marriage have acted as a cover for years of personal and public betrayal. Her husband, it appears, has spent nearly a decade using her for his own purposes, and now the British intelligence service want to use her for theirs. It would be so easy to give in, to back away from the conspiracies and intrigues that suddenly loom in front of her. But the shock of Sam’s betrayal has woken Molly out of her long, complacent dream, and she is no longer prepared to be anybody’s pawn....

Mary Connon was a small-town femme fatale, eager to test her allure on any man between 6 and 60. When she's found dead in her own living room, her husband -- the one bloke to whom she never blew a kiss -- comes instantly under suspicion. But Andy Dalziel, the gloriously vulgar savant of the Mid-Yorkshire police force, has some other ideas, and all of them center on the local rugby club -- the town's social center, and Mary Connon's preferred hunting ground. Peter Pascoe, Dalziel's young sergeant, suspects that his new boss's interest in the club has at least as much to do with access to good beer as it does with solving the murder. But while Dalziel never said no to a pint or three, Pascoe has much to learn about Fat Andy's uniquely effective methodology. With A Clubbable Woman -- the first in an astonishing, multi-award-winning series -- his education begins....

Into thin air...

Three little girls, one by one, had vanished from the farming village of Dendale. And Superintendent Andy Dalziel, a young detective in those days, never found their bodies--or the person who snatched them. Then the valley where Dendale stood was flooded to create a reservoir, and the town itself ceased to be . . . except in Dalziel's memory.

Twelve years later, the threads of past and present are slowly winding into a chilling mosaic. A drought and dropping water table have brought Dendale's ruins into view. And a little girl has gone missing from a nearby village. Helped by Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe, an older, fatter, and wiser Dalziel has a second chance to uncover the secrets of a drowned valley. And now the identity of a killer rests on what one child saw . . . and what another, now grown, fears with all her heart to remember . . . ....