Reginald Hill Books in Order

A selection of mystery and suspense stories ranging from a beloved detective's death in a fire to a fresh take on Sherlock Holmes abroad. The collection showcases Hill's gift for atmosphere, neat reversals and darkly funny observations in shorter form.

This collection gathers festive themed crime tales, including a new story that sees Dalziel and Pascoe tracking a particularly nasty killer at Christmas. From vicars in trouble to bodies hidden where no one looks in December, the pieces mix seasonal detail with Hill's usual twisty plotting.

Sir Wilfred Wolf Hadda rose from a woodcutter's cottage to wealth, a title and a glamorous wife, only to be destroyed by charges of fraud and child pornography. After prison and disgrace, he returns to his Cumbrian roots, quietly sharpening his metaphorical axe while he works out who framed him and how to answer.

Over the course of a single October Sunday, Dalziel agrees to help the wife of a disgraced missing policeman after she spots a photo that might show him alive. The trail threads through political money, tabloid journalism and hired muscle, dragging the Mid Yorkshire team into a very long day.

Joe Sixsmith is asked to look into threats aimed at a brilliant black golfer just before a high profile charity tournament at an exclusive club. Among immaculate greens, sour committee men and simmering prejudice, Joe must work out who wants the competition fixed and how far they will go.

Recovering from a bomb blast at a seaside clinic in Sandytown, Dalziel cannot resist poking his nose into the town's grand redevelopment plans and long running feuds. When a macabre death shocks the resort, his convalescence collides with Pascoe's murder inquiry in very Austen tinged fashion.

This short novel looks back to the chaotic first meeting between an idealistic young Peter Pascoe and a much younger but no less formidable Andy Dalziel, when a reluctant national serviceman discovers that dodging duty is harder than it looks.

A suspected terrorist bomb in a small video shop leaves Dalziel gravely injured and in a coma, while Pascoe is seconded to a national unit hunting an extremist group with powerful sympathisers. Torn between official secrecy and loyalty to his boss, he pushes the inquiry into increasingly dangerous territory.

In a brooding Cumbrian village, Australian student Sam Flood searches for the truth about her transported grandmother while Spanish would be priest Miguel Madero researches recusant history. Their uneasy alliance leads them to the Stranger House, a former inn steeped in legends, child migration schemes and a history some locals would kill to keep buried.

A businessman kills himself in a locked room in exactly the same way his father did ten years earlier. Looking past the staged symmetry, Dalziel and Pascoe uncover family betrayals, arms trading, government interests and a web of secrets that reaches well beyond one troubled household.

A long planned revenge, an unfinished Jacobean tragedy and a series of apparently unrelated deaths draw Dalziel, Pascoe and Wield into a maze that stretches from Mid Yorkshire to Germany. Old student friendships, obsessive scholarship and personal loyalties all prove more dangerous than they look.

A writing competition becomes the stage for a killer who submits eerie one sided dialogues describing murders before they happen. Dalziel, Pascoe and a young constable struggle to decode the word games and literary tricks before the body count climbs any higher.

Travelling to a Welsh choral festival with his chapel choir, Joe Sixsmith becomes a local hero when he rescues a naked, unidentified woman from a burning cottage. Hired separately by the cottage's owner, his suspicious wife and a troubled teenager, he soon discovers that arson is only one of the village's secrets.

Ellie Pascoe narrowly escapes an apparent abduction and soon finds both herself and sharp tongued neighbour Daphne targeted. Sent to a remote coastal house with Daphne and DC Shirley Novello as protection, she is drawn into a plot involving arms deals, old grudges and women who refuse to stay in the background.

Years after a valley was flooded to create a reservoir and three local girls vanished, drought exposes the drowned village just as another child disappears. Dalziel and Pascoe face grief that never healed, rumours that Benny Lightfoot has returned and a case where legend and memory are as treacherous as the water.

When a pompous Luton lawyer insults Joe Sixsmith over an insurance dispute, Joe leaves vowing revenge he never expects to take. After partners at the firm start dying and he is treated as prime suspect, Joe must clear his name while protecting a star athlete menaced before a big event.

This collection of four Dalziel and Pascoe stories traces their partnership from a disastrous first meeting through ghostly vigil and night time stakeout to a futuristic investigation on the Moon. It offers compact mysteries, character glimpses and an extra spin on the duo's long running relationship.

Animal rights protests at a pharmaceutical company collide with the unearthing of an old corpse and a set of World War One documents tied to Pascoe's own family. As Dalziel and Pascoe follow clues from muddy demonstration lines to Flanders fields, the sins of past and present bleed into each other.

After choir practice Joe Sixsmith finds a boy's body left in a cardboard box in a churchyard, the first of several tangled problems that land on his desk. Between a haunted old soldier, a teenage bank clerk and a teacher with suspect parties, Joe struggles to separate guilt from responsibility.

A village constable disappears from the apparently tranquil Yorkshire hamlet of Enscombe, sending Pascoe and Wield into a community that prides itself on good manners and buried grievances. Jane Austen echoes, half heard scandals and slyly modern concerns give their search an unsettling edge.

A man whose life has always revolved around risk taking discovers that someone is turning his favourite games into leverage. Drawn into a criminal scheme where debts are collected in blood as well as money, he has to decide how high a stake he is willing to play for.

Laid off from his job at a Luton car plant, Joe Sixsmith reluctantly takes on a complaint about a racist helpline and finds himself navigating hate mail, nervous staff and a suspicious death. His mix of stubborn decency and quiet observation proves more effective than any official inquiry.

Nearly thirty years after a sensational country house murder linked to ministers and spies, the nanny convicted as an accomplice is released. Determined to defend the reputation of the mentor who led the original inquiry, Dalziel drags Pascoe back through a case where every new answer rewrites the past.

Set in 2010, this novella sends a retired Dalziel and a very senior Pascoe to the Moon to investigate the first murder in space. Political pressure, confined suspects and a hostile environment make their most far flung case as tricky as anything in Mid Yorkshire.

Dalziel, half drunk, witnesses what he is sure is a cold blooded shooting, but the husband and lover present insist it was a struggle gone wrong. While he pushes at the gaps in their story, Pascoe hunts for the sender of chilling anonymous letters promising a spectacular public suicide.

Posted to a politically tense foreign setting, an Englishman who hoped for a quiet posting instead finds himself surrounded by corruption, casual brutality and the ghosts of earlier colonial entanglements. When violence erupts, he must choose between looking away and taking a stand that could cost him everything.

The discovery of a skeleton in an old mine shaft reopens wounds in the tight knit mining village of Burrthorpe, where a child once vanished and a respected miner died in a suspicious fall. As Dalziel and Pascoe investigate, Ellie Pascoe's sympathy for a troubled young miner puts her marriage under pressure.

Jaysmith is an expert sniper whose failing eyesight causes him to miss a target for the first time. Retiring to the Lake District and falling for a young widow, he discovers that her kindly father is the man he was once sent to kill, and his old employers are not finished with any of them.

This collection brings together a novella about a Soviet inspector forced to explain away a seemingly supernatural lift accident and five sly crime stories, including the first appearance of Joe Sixsmith. Hill mixes satire, puzzle plotting and ghost story atmosphere in compact form.

In Nazi occupied France, young wife Janine Simonian agrees to inform for German intelligence in exchange for news of her husband and, later, for a desperate chance to save her children. Her uneasy bond with sympathetic officer Günter Mai becomes a moral trap whose cost is only fully clear after liberation.

A quiet office worker who has always accepted the official story of her father's death begins to notice oddities in her tidy life, from altered files to unexpected inheritances. As she probes her own past, she realises someone would prefer that both history and she herself simply disappeared.

Hoping to escape a failing marriage, Harry Bentink joins old friend Peter for a walking holiday in the Lake District. When two young tourists are raped and murdered on the fells, both men find themselves under suspicion, and Harry's attempt to run only plunges him deeper into danger.

An eccentric widow leaves her fortune to a son missing in action since the war, with a long deadline for him to claim it. When a man appears at the funeral claiming to be the heir, then ends up dead, Dalziel and Pascoe face a tangle of family resentments, charity politics and murder.

Set around the First World War, this novel follows soldiers and civilians caught between the mud of the front and the compromises of life at home. As friendships, loyalties and ideals are tested, Hill looks at the different kinds of survival people will settle for when the shooting stops.

On a single wet night three elderly people die in apparently separate incidents, one of them involving Dalziel's own car. Suspended and under suspicion, he leaves Pascoe to unravel how the victims, an old folks' home and a betting scam really connect.

Disgraced aristocrat Lem Stanhope Swift has hidden for years in Venezuela, until a cancer diagnosis and longing for his daughter tempt him back to England. Secret services on both sides of the Cold War pounce, tying his return to an assignment involving the one man he hates most his father.

A wealthy family of rose growers seems to flourish despite a trail of sudden deaths and vanishing relatives. Dalziel and Pascoe dig into old affairs, long delayed inheritances and a garden full of carefully tended secrets to find out who is pruning the family tree.

Inspector Doug McHarg once guarded a minor royal and now finds himself the target of a shadowy masonic style organisation after a run of ugly crimes. Following attempts on his life from London to North America, he uncovers a conspiracy that reaches from lodge room to palace.

Molly Keatley's safe seaside life shatters when her journalist husband vanishes and a British agent calmly informs her he is a Soviet spy and traitor. Between angry parents, a dangerous mistress and competing agencies, Molly has to decide who to trust and what sort of life she wants next.

A serial strangler dubbed the Yorkshire Choker is targeting women and leaving cryptic quotations from Hamlet. Dalziel fixates on a sleazy schoolteacher, Pascoe looks elsewhere and a nearby gypsy camp becomes a flashpoint as the investigation tightens.

This prequel traces Carlo Fantom's youth from a hard Croatian farm through piracy, soldiering and his first taste of high stakes politics. Written as his own confession, it shows how a quick witted peasant boy is hammered into the ruthless captain readers meet in *Captain Fantom*.

Called to a remote farmhouse by a man convinced his missing sister haunts him, Pascoe agrees to spend a night on watch. What follows is a tightly wound tale in which family guilt, lonely moorland and one very odd household test his belief in tidy, rational explanations.

Framed as the ribald memoirs of seventeenth century mercenary Carlo Fantom, this adventure follows him across war torn Europe as he sells his brutal talents to whichever army pays, surviving sieges, ambushes and intrigues with a mix of languages, charm and calculated savagery.

When Pascoe's dentist becomes convinced a violent scene in an adult film shows a real assault, Dalziel dismisses it as fantasy. A vandalised cinema, a dead proprietor and vanished film stock force the pair to take a hard look at the Calliope Club and the town's respectable faces.

On a package tour to Italy, Sarah and Michael Masson hope Venice will revive their faltering marriage. Instead they find jealous couples, mysterious drifters and a flirtatious bully whose behaviour turns sinister, leaving Michael answering police questions while Sarah faces a choice about her future.

An archaeological dig on bleak moorland uncovers prehistoric urn burials and something far more recent. Academic rivalries, local legends and a brooding landowner create a dangerous mix as the team realises that someone is prepared to kill to keep certain bones undisturbed.

Taking leave while Pascoe is on honeymoon, Dalziel drifts into the orbit of the eccentric Fielding family after a funeral and a flood strand him at their half finished country hotel. Embezzlement, unexplained deaths and a seductive widow soon turn his holiday into a very damp busman's holiday.

A routine coach trip through wild countryside leaves a mixed group of passengers stranded at an isolated outpost where nothing is quite as advertised. As tempers fray and hidden agendas emerge, the journey turns into a tense struggle over who, if anyone, will make it home.

In a dystopian Britain carved up between rival football clubs, parliament has vanished and hooligan gangs enforce the only laws that matter. Expatriate journalist Whitey Singleton is dragged back into this tribal state and onto a hijacked plane, then into a violent conspiracy centred on Wembley Stadium.

Years after the violence of political conflict should have ended, old grudges still simmer. A man who thought he had left that world behind is pulled back toward informers, bombers and payback, forced to decide whether hatred or survival will shape his last moves.

A weekend reunion turns to horror when Pascoe arrives at a friend's cottage and finds a triple murder scene. As Dalziel joins the case, old loyalties, past love affairs and small village tensions make every assumption about the killings suspect.

In a near future Britain that once adopted a draconian Age Law, every citizen carries a heart device set to stop at a fixed age. As architect of the scheme Matthew Matlock nears his own limit, he finds allies and enemies who want him to help change the rules before time quite literally runs out.

At a snowbound country hotel offering a Dickens themed festive break, Arabella Allen expects skating, punch and harmless nostalgia. A frozen corpse, cut phone lines and a host whose motives are increasingly suspect turn the cosy weekend into a deadly country house puzzle.

Village schoolteacher Joe Askern knows far too much about the local stately home. When a small time crook and his girlfriend blackmail him into planning a robbery there, Joe is dragged from daydreams into a very real heist where nothing goes quite to script.

Persuaded by her husband to holiday on a bleak headland crowned by a mock medieval castle, Emily Follett expects sea air and solitude. Instead she finds strange guests, watching eyes and a quietly escalating Cold War game in which her marriage is only one of the lies.

Sent to a remote northern campus after a body is found in the snow, Dalziel and Pascoe pick their way through academic politics, old student radicalism and buried scandals, while Pascoe unexpectedly reconnects with a sharp tongued lecturer from his past.

When rugby veteran Connie Connon comes home concussed from a match and wakes to find his wife dead in front of the television, Dalziel and Pascoe uncover grudges, secrets and jealousies festering around the local club and the Connon marriage.