These are his thoughts as he hunts for Andy's attackers across England. Sneaking around behind the backs of his new friends in counter-terrorism who have conveniently seconded him to their service where they hope to keep him under wraps. But Peter hasn't been under the tutelage of Andy Dalziel all these years for nothing. Piece by piece he puts together the jigsaw puzzle with help from the most unlikely of sources.
Constable Hector, who thought he heard the shot that brought everyone to the scene, has always been a standing joke around the department. The idiot child of the Mid-Yorkshire force turns out though to be close to savant when it comes to drawing faces from memory.
When someone tries to clean up a loose end in Hector and tries a hit and run that fails, Hector is able to draw the driver's face from memory. When the same face turns up on the back of a novel about counter-terrorism in the Gulf War, and in Hector's room trying to visit him after the accident, Peter knows they have one of their men.
Reginald Hill delivers another wonderful book with two of the most memorable detectives in the Parthenon of British detective writing. How many other authors have created a character that can dominate it even when they are laid up in a coma for the majority of the book? Oh, all right; Andy does a little astral projecting, negotiates with death on occasion, but it's not much more then he usually does in a day's work, as I'm sure he'd be the first to tell you over the pint that you bought him.
Reginald Hill writes books that are about people who happen to solve crimes because they are cops, but they are also people and as such he has succeeded in bringing one of the most human faces to policing of any of the writers of crime fiction alive today. Death Comes For The Fat Man is touching, scary, funny, and very human all at once.
There is a crime to be solved, and murders to be prevented, but there are also lives to live and hopefully to be celebrated and not mourned.
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