AN APRIL SHROUD

First US publication for a 1975 Dalziel/Pascoe mystery (cf. Ruling Passion, A Clubbable Woman, etc.)—which begins with Pascoe's wedding to whiplash-smart Ellie and then sends fat, depressed, surly Dalziel off on his own, looking for a vacation-spot. . .but finding only a very creepy, black-comic sort of busman's holiday. When his car breaks down amid April countryside floods, you see, Dalziel joins a weird, floating funeral procession—and winds up taking shelter with the grieving (well, semi-grieving) Fielding family. They're just buried father Conrad Fielding, who died accidentally O), pierced by an electric drill, while working on the family's current enterprise: converting an old house into a restaurant in the medieval-banquet-hall manner. And now, while widow Bonnie Wonders how to keep this bankrupted project going, son Nigel disappears, as does the sexy live-in cook—who soon turns up dead, along with the insurance investigator assigned to Conrad's accidental-death case. Also complicating matters: Dalziel's attraction to the comely widow (whose previous husband also died in iffy circumstances); and the cranky doings of Grandpa Fielding, a poet who has just received (ungraciously) a $15,000 grant from an American foundation. No great suspense or surprises—but, with a lake-chase at the close and other bits of watery atmosphere, this is a solid entertainment in the Hill manner: sardonic, darkly funny, occasionally even a little haunting, with foul Dalziel at his most grimly vulnerable.