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A Killing Kindness (1987)

A Killing Kindness (1987)

Book Info

Author
Genre
Rating
4.14 of 5 Votes: 2
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ISBN
0586072519 (ISBN13: 9780586072516)
Language
English
Publisher
harpercollinspublishers

About book A Killing Kindness (1987)

As far as I can tell the Yorkshire Ripper came into being in 1975 (although I'd guess that the nickname didn't get invented until a while after that) and Peter Sutcliffe wasn't arrested until 1981. This fact is interesting because this book was published in 1980 and concerns the career of the fictional "Yorkshire Choker". Since the Yorkshire Ripper looms large in my childhood memories of the news (he gets equal billing with Ethiopian famines) I found there was something rather disturbing about reading a book which must have its origins in that case.I wonder why Hill decided to create a fictional serial killer for his detective duo. Whilst the nicknames for the real life and fictional killers instantly demand a comparison I don't think that the killer in the book is particularly modelled on the real life version even given that background details needed in a book like this wouldn't have been available in 1980. I wonder if writing a book about Yorkshire police in 1980 and not having them dealing with a serial killer would have been a stranger thing than the kind of crossover between real life and fiction that I see reading this book twenty years later.There's at least one rather clever device used in this book that I haven't come across in mystery fiction before and the home lives of the detectives fit in neatly with the plot. I have some reservations about the actual ending of this book but on the whole I thought it was pretty good and probably my second favourite of the series this far after A Pinch of Snuff.[This is book 6 in the Dalziel and Pascoe series]

This is quite possibly the best of the Dalziel and Pascoe novels that I've read so far. It's a very well paced police procedural with enough twists and turns to keep you hooked until the very end. If you haven't tried this series before, this book would be a good place to start; it's an excellent example of most of the things the series does right. One thing that particularly impressed me about this book is how it deals with a lot of difficult subject matter. There is a serial killer who is murdering young women; there is a nearby encampment of Romany, some of whom fall under suspicion for the crime; there's the return of the radical feminist group we first met in A Pinch of Snuff; and there are some moments when the police resort to some decidedly dodgy tactics to get their evidence. The opportunities for the author to do something cringeworthy in relation to ethnicity or gender are numerous, as are the moments where I might expect another author to deliver a crude political rant. Hill evades these pitfalls. His characters, although they can be pretty extreme, never seem like stereotypes to me. The world Hill depicts can be pretty ugly, but you never feel like he's stacking the deck to make a point.

Do You like book A Killing Kindness (1987)?

This was the only one of the Dalziel and Pascoe series that I hadn't read yet. I fits in well with the rest of the series, although, I felt that there was a bit too much Pascoe and not enough Dalziel here.An interesting thing for me was that it was the first time I read a large print edition - it was the only copy of the book in our library system. It wasn't unpleasant to read the larger print, but I do prefer more normal size. I hope that this wasn't a harbinger of my future but, if it is, I guess it will be better to read large print than to not be able to read at all.
—Paul Secor

Thirty years on A Killing Kindness still reads well and Colin Buchanan does a great job on bringing the audiobook to life. The book must have been ahead of its time in the early 1980s and it shows in the rather improbable sequence of serial killings and the quaint police psychologist (or 'trick cyclist' as Dalziel inevitably calls him), not to mention the gay police sergeant and feminist solicitor. But Reginald Hill's books are always a bit off to the side of mainstream crime writing and that's part of their charm. Who else would name a suspect Wildgoose?
—Phil Benson

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