Month: September 2019

My Friday Post: Ruling Passion by Reginald Hill

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

Book Beginnings Button

Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading, along with your initial thoughts about the sentence, impressions of the book, or anything else the opener inspires.

Ruling Passion by Reginald Hill is one of the books I’m reading at the moment.  It’s one of my TBRs, the third Dalziel and Pascoe book in which Pascoe finds his social life and work uncomfortably brought together by a terrible triple murder. Meanwhile, Dalziel is pressuring him about a string of unsolved burglaries, and as events unfold the two cases keep getting jumbled in his mind.

Ruling passion

Brookside Cottage,Thornton Lacey. September 4th.

Well hello, Peter Pascoe!

A voice from the grave! Or should I say the underworld? Out of which Ellie (who gave me the glad news of your existence when we met in town last month) hopes to lead you, for a while at least, back into the land of the living.

As soon as I finished reading the 2nd book in the series, An Advancement of Learning, I just had to start the third. I’ve read some of the later books but not the early ones, so I’m keen to know more about Dalziel and Pascoe. In An Advancement of Learning Pascoe and Ellie (his wife in the later books) had just renewed the relationship they’d had at university and so I’m pleased to see in the opening chapters of this book that they are together. In this first chapter a friend from their university days has invited them to stay for a weekend in the country.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice.

30879-friday2b56These are the rules:

  1. Grab a book, any book.
  2. Turn to page 56, or 56% on your eReader. If you have to improvise, that is okay.
  3. Find any sentence (or a few, just don’t spoil it) that grabs you.
  4. Post it.
  5. Add the URL to your post in the link on Freda’s most recent Friday 56 post.

Page 56:

‘We got on very well from the start. I’d only known her and Colin a couple of months, but we soon got on friendly terms. That’s why it came as such a shock … I still can’t believe it.’

The weekend in the country has turned into a nightmare!

Have read this book? What did you think about it? And if you haven’t, would you keep on reading?

The 20 Books of Summer Challenge 2019 Is Over …

Published on by Margaret15 Comments

20 bks of summer 2019

Yesterday the 20 Books of Summer Challenge, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books,  came to an end … and once more I didn’t manage to read all twenty of the books I’d listed. Although over the 3 months of this challenge I read 24 books, only 8 of them were ones I’d earmarked, as shown below, with links to my reviews.  All 8 are books that were on my TBR shelves, so although it could have been better, I think that is a good result.

  1. Those Who Are Loved by Victoria Hislop 4.5*
  2. Anything You Do Say by Gillian McAllister 4*
  3. Beneath the Surface by Fiona Neill 4*
  4. Blood on the Tracks edited by Martin Edwards 3*
  5. Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L Sayers 4*
  6. The Seven Sisters by Lucinda Riley 5*
  7. Operation Pax by Michael Innes 4*
  8. An Advancement of Learning by Reginald Hill 4.5*

Of these my favourite is The Seven Sisters by Lucinda Riley and now I’m eager to read the whole series beginning with next one, The Storm Sister.

Of the remaining books on my list I have started 2 of them – Ruling Passion and Life After Life, and I intend/hope to read the others before the end of the year:

  1. The Man in the Queue by Josephine Tey
  2. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
  3. The Silver Box by Mina Bates
  4. The Moon Sister by Lucinda Riley
  5. No Tomorrow by Luke Jennings
  6. An April Shroud by Reginald Hill
  7. Ruling Passion by Reginald Hill
  8. The Island by Victoria Hislop
  9. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
  10. Becoming Mrs Lewis by Patti Callahan
  11. The Rose Labyrinth by Tatania Hardie
  12. Daughter of Earth and Water: a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley by Noel Gerson

An Advancement of Learning by Reginald Hill: Mini Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

An Advancement of learning

An Advancement of Learning is Reginald Hill’s second Dalziel and Pascoe novel, first published in 1971. It’s much better than the first one, A Clubbable Woman and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s set in a college, Holm Coultram College, where Dalziel and Pascoe investigate the discovery of a body found as an eight foot high bronze statue of Miss Girling, a former head of the College in the grounds is being moved. As the base of the statue is lifted earth falls away together with a shin bone followed by part of a rib cage and then a skull, still with a mop of dark red hair attached. Miss Girling had red hair – but she had died in an avalanche in Austria – so whose body was buried under the statue?

The plot is by no means straight forward and for most of the book continued to puzzle me, even though I thought the ending was rather weak. But the strength of this book is in the writing and the characterisation. It is a character-driven murder mystery, with a cast of characters including Girling, Halfdane, Fallowfield, Cockshut, and Disney, known as ‘Walt’, of course and I had no difficulty in keeping who was who clearly in my mind. It’s interesting to see the early relationship between Dalziel, shown as a rude, boorish character, and Pascoe, the university educated young DS. Dalziel is very much out of his comfort zone with the academic staff and looks to Pascoe to understand how the college operates, whilst mocking him. Pascoe renews his relationship with Ellie Soper, an ex-girlfriend from his university days – a feisty young woman, but a minor character in this book. 

Written in 1971 it is very much a book of its time. I read it quickly, as the two detectives uncover plenty of disagreements and power struggles in both the staff and student bodies – from rivalries to revelries on the beach, and more dead bodies turn up before the mystery is solved.

And reading it has made me keen to get on the next book in the series, Ruling Passion, which I’ve started almost straight away! I’ve been reading this series totally out of order, beginning with some of the later books – much more detailed and complex than the first books.

  • Paperback: 352 pages
  • Publisher: HarperCollins (25 Jun. 2009)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 9780007313037
  • ISBN-13: 978-0007313037
  • Source: I bought it
  • My Rating: 4.5*

Reading challenges: Mount TBR, Calendar of Crime, 20 Books of Summer