Arms and the Women

By Reginald Hill

‘Luminously written, thrilling, unexpectedly erudite, and beautifully structured’ Geoffrey Wansell, Daily Mail

When Ellie Pascoe finds herself under threat, her husband DCI Peter Pascoe and Superintendent Andy Dalziel assume it’s because she’s married to a cop.

While they hunt down the source of the danger, Ellie heads out of town in search of a haven… only to get tangled up in a conspiracy involving Irish arms, Colombian drugs and men who will stop at nothing to achieve their ends.

Dalziel eventually concludes the security services are involved, but by then it is too late. Ellie’s on her own – and must dig deep down into her reserves to survive…

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jul 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9780007378548

Reginald Hill

Reginald Hill, acclaimed English crime writer, was a native of Cumbria and a former resident of Yorkshire, the setting for his novels featuring Superintendent Andy Dalziel and DCI Peter Pascoe. Their appearances won Hill numerous awards, including a CWA Golden Dagger and the Cartier Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award. The Dalziel and Pascoe stories were also adapted into a hugely popular BBC TV series. Hill died in 2012.

Reviews for Arms and the Women

[bjace_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Probably my least favorite Dalziel and Pascoe. Large sections of the book are the text of a novel being written by Ellie Pascoe, which I found annoying. When a kidnapping attempt is made on Peter Pascoe's wife, investigations into Pascoe's enemies turn up nothing; the key to the mystery is in Ellie's political involvements. The finale is over-the-top.

[elizabethanns_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found this one hard to get into interesting as it was with the story in the story. I do like how Hill plays around with words and different forms in his novels but this one was I found a bit of a struggle. Took me far longer to read then most.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

One of the great joys of the Dalziel and Pascoe stories, especially the later ones, is that you never know what you are going to get. Hill jumps about - apparently at random - between serious crime stories and genre-bending pastiche, all of them a delight to the reader. Having lulled us into a false sense of security with this book's immediate predecessor On Beulah Height, a straight and rather harrowing crime story about the disappearance of a number of young girls, Hill now leaps out from behind a tree with this high-camp pastiche of a gun-running story, featuring old-school-tie spies and Colombian and Irish terrorists who would make John Le Carré blush, and building up to a splendid grand guignol finale (in a storm on a cliff-top, no less). If Ronald Firbank had ever written a thriller, it would be like this. For a change, Ellie Pascoe becomes the main viewpoint character, and there is an extended, and very entertaining, book-within-a-book device involving a pastiche historical novel she is writing for her own amusement. It would spoil the fun to explain what it's about, but suffice it to say that it is the story she started at the end of On Beulah Height, with the wonderful opening line "It was a dark and stormy night." Excellent fun, all round.