When Mary Dinwoodie is found choked in a ditch following a night out with her boyfriend, a mysterious caller phones the local paper with a quotation from Hamlet. The career of the Yorkshire Choker is underway.
If Superintendent Dalziel is unimpressed by the literary phone calls, he is downright angry when Sergeant Wield calls in a clairvoyant.
Linguists, psychiatrists, mediums – it’s all a load of nonsense as far as he is concerned, designed to make a fool of him.
And meanwhile the Choker strikes again – and again...
Reginald Hill was brought up in Cumbria, and has returned there after many years in Yorkshire. His Dalziel and Pascoe novels are amongst the best-loved and most admired in crime fiction. They have been adapted by the BBC, won many awards and are top ten bestsellers.