Rating: 
Summary: Proper British mystery of the very best kind
Review: I bought this book for its lovely title's sake only, so if it had turned out to be a bore I would have got what I deserved. Luckily it is nothing like it: considering the general dearth of good crime novels this one is a gem: Good writing! Solid, believable, interesting characters! Snappy and smart dialogue that is really snappy and smart! A well-built mystery that is not contrived and does not cheat on the reader, and that you cannot guess by page 10! This is my first Reginald Hill, but by all means it is not going to be the last.
Rating:
Summary: Better by the Book
Review: I've been following Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe series for years; the only thing bad about this the author is his unfortunate tendency to go out-of-print here in the States. This is an author whose writing has undergone a noticeable improvement over the years. The first books in the series seem more formulaic and even a bit dated when held up to later entries. But this is only comparing a writer against himself: these books still stand out among the usual British procedurals; Hill's distinctive characterization is present from the first book. It's definitely worth reading the series in order, if you can find all the titles. Doing so, you can trace the development of all the characters, most notably Wield and Dalziel, who usually steal the show from the intellectual and prototypically 'heroic' Pascoe. These two are in no way side characters; this is ensemble work. 'On Beulah Height' is another great entry in the series, digging deep into the Yorkshire landscape and making a compelling story of local history. Buy, buy, buy, and tell your friends. I keep hoping that the more interest in raised in this series, the better our chances to see reissues of the earlier works.
Rating:
Summary: ON BEULAH HEIGHT
Review: I've just begun to read Reginald Hill in my constant search for new and exciting authors, and I seem to have hit the jackpot with this one. (I'm writing this review as I'm searching for the next Hill novel to put on my shopping list!) The characters are alive, the plot is intricate, the story is highly emotional, and the reader's involvement is intense until the last page has been turned. In my mind, a true masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: ON BEULAH HEIGHT
Review: I've just begun to read Reginald Hill in my constant search for new and exciting authors, and I seem to have hit the jackpot with this one. (I'm writing this review as I'm searching for the next Hill novel to put on my shopping list!) The characters are alive, the plot is intricate, the story is highly emotional, and the reader's involvement is intense until the last page has been turned. In my mind, a true masterpiece.
Rating: 
Summary: Farther beyond the police procedural
Review: In his recent Dalziel-Pascoe detective novels, Reginald Hill has stretched the genre well beyond its normal limits - by probing the psychological background and personal lives of his investigators (even, in this book, the Pascoes' daughter); breaking the narrative for flashbacks; and introducing subplots that, in the end, more or less flow back into the mainstream of the narrative. In The Woods Beyond, the main back-story device was too schematic to be convincing (see my review of that if you're interested); here, though, in spite of a story that is if anything even more complex, throwing in elements ranging from a child's fantasy to the Mahler song cycle Kindertotenlieder, Hill pulls it off more coherently. The case involves the disappearance of a young girl, which appears to have links to another series of disappearances 15 years earlier, in a Yorkshire village called Dendale. Around the time of the earlier disappearances, Dendale was de-populated, its inhabitants relocated, and the village disappeared under a new dam. At the time of the present case, the village's ruins are reappearing because of a severe heat wave that is drying up the dam-created lake. (This aspect of the plot is oddly similar to that in Peter Robinson's In a Dry Season. If Yorkshire really has such bone-dry summers these days, global warming must be a fact!) Mystery fans unaccustomed to Hill's latter-day style who come to this novel expecting a conventional, straightforward police procedural may find themselves thrown off balance. If that is you, I recommend you stick with it: your indulgence will be rewarded. Those familiar with the Dalziel-Pascoe series will respond to all its usual virtues, including the contradictory character of "Fat Andy" Dalziel, crude and sarcastic yet possessed of a kind of psychological x-ray vision that penetrates the lies, stratagems and evasions of a suspect in short order. One annoyance: the publisher of the American edition has seen fit to change the British spellings to American ones where they differ. That makes no sense, commercially or artistically. Any reader who enjoys, or can accept, the thick Yorkshire dialect in which the characters speak is hardly going to be deterred by a few spelling variants. What was anybody thinking?
Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary, complex mystery with excellent writing!
Review: It's so rare to pick up a modern author from this genre (mystery) and have his talent as a wordsmith be so exquisite. If I seem effusive concerning this book, you will have to excuse me. When you get stuck reading a lot of badly written textbooks, and other material whether books or journals for profesional purposes, when you do pick up a good mystery (based on recommendations from Amazon.com--thanks guys!) it is nice to be able to dive into a story which is not only a good mystery, but the writing itself is wonderful. The British have a way with the English language. I don't know what is in the water over there, but I am increasingly finding that my tastes are generally more satisfied when reading British mysteries. And I am not talking Agatha Christie here, though I've read stuff that far back. Hill is an obvious contender for those who enjoy P.D. James mysteries, as well as historical mysteries of the type written by Charles Todd (I keep forgetting he is American). This story is painstakingly drawn out. It's a hefty mystery, and frankly, Hill did a great job by not allowing the reader to determine who was responsible for the disappearance of several young girls. I made several errors in judgement, that were solved (sensibly thank heavens) in the last three chapters. Rarely do I get up out of bed at night and spend three hours in a chair to finish reading a book which I just cannot put down. But I did this with this author. I am looking forward to his other books...it is great to find another author with many books to his name that I can enjoy for a while (I read so fast usually that I go through good authors too quick and have to find another one).
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Summary: Where do the lost go?--deeper than memory
Review: Much, much more than a police procedural about the serial murder of little girls, On Beulah Height is a deeply haunting and moving exploration of the afterlives we create for those who disappear. The only thing I can remotely tie it to is Peter Wier's haunting exploration of the aftermath of disappearance in his film Picnic at Hanging Rock. Hill's last novel, The Wood Beyond, belongs in the pantheon of great novels about the unending legacy of World War I, along with Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors and Graham Swift's Waterland. There, the dead are buried, but rise again to tell their truths to their children's children. In this novel, the dead are children who disappear. They don't return to tell their parents mundane truths; instead, they cause them to dream dreams, imagine legends of an underworld of caves and drowned villages, of holes in the hillside inhabited by ageless little maids who will be, as one father imagines, "troubled by the light" when they come out again. Parents, teachers, police, doctors, nurses, all the adults in the story, try desperately to cope with and control the mad upside-downness of a landscape in which it is possible for children to die before their parents. It is as unreasonable to the reasoning mind as the idea of a dale full of farms, schools, and churches, being drowned under the flood of a new reservoir. Yet both situations are painfully factual. How could any world inhabited by the likes of Andy Dalziel NOT be? And he's here in all his massive, randy, rambunctious glory to ensure that we don't get lost in the feyness of the tale. The children, on the other hand, understand quite well the nature of what happens to their playmates and to them. Rosie Pascoe, dreaming away time in a twilit cave between life and death, and Elizabeth Wulfstan, a young artist whose childhood was marked by an earlier set of disappearances, both understand the essential quality of events. It is they, not the grownups, who can solve the case. It is very simple--there's something mysterious, greedily hungry, wicked, that wants to carry tender young life down with it into its dark cave. Never mind the usual clinical imaginings of what makes a child-killer. In this novel, such a being is a goblin, a nix, a golem, a troll. Never mind Rosie and her friend Zandra are the well-tended children of thoroughly modern and sophisticated parents. In this novel, as in life itself, the very best parents can be blindsided, sidelined, rendered utterly, primitively irrational by the prospect that their children can be snatched from them by death. It's enough to make Fat Andy snap a car's dashboard in two with a blow of the fist. It's enough to make the parents of lost children permanently moonstruck, to possess them with furious revengefulness and mad behavior. Hill makes brilliant use of text from Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, translated into Yorkshire dialect, to express the longing and mystery that afflict those left behind. In previous novels--Recalled to Life springs to mind--Hill has done great things with quotations from earlier works of art. But never has he used such material to greater effect than here. He has made the poems, if not the music, his own. I, for one, look forward to rereading this novel a second time, with Mahler's songs playing in the background.
Rating:
Summary: This beautifully written mystery novel transcends the genre.
Review: Never has Hill's ensemble cast of characters worked better than in this haunting tale of children gone missing in the Yorkshire region of England. By interweaving an elemental, terrifying local legend with real events, the author has given his tale a mythic dimension. At the same time, real people are in terrible pain for their children. As always, Hill injects just enough humor to keep the proceedings from becoming altogether too grim. This novel is a triumph - P.D. James-caliber mystery writing. (Fans of Colin Dexter's Morse novels would also enjoy this series.)
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Summary: Powerful entry in the "Dalziel and Pascoe" series
Review: Quite possibly the strongest of Hill's novels, *On Beulah Height* evokes, with eerie intensity, every parent's visceral fear of losing their child. At the same time, it explores the multiple and complex strands of love: between parent and child, performer and vocation, person and place, man and woman (or man)... And there are some nifty thematic hooks, like Mahler's *Kindertotenlieder* and a folktale-children's story, "Nina and the Nix" (complete with illustration), both of which play important parts in the narrative's development. As always, Hill jumps gracefully between different times and points of view. There is some occasional humor to leaven what otherwise might be an unbearably grim novel. Readers new to this series should be aware that this really is a *series*; while Hill does some necessary retreading in spots, in several instances readers do need to know the previous novels in order to make sense of the action or character development (particularly in the case of Sgt. Wield). And be warned: the Yorkshire dialect can be heavy going if you are not yet accustomed to it.
Rating:
Summary: Child Disappearances
Review: Reginald Hill currently produces some of the most intelligent and best written mysteries out there. _On Beulah Height_ (a Dalziel and Pascoe novel) is a fine continuation of that tradition. A town in Yorkshire doomed by a reservoir project had been the scene of a terrifying series of child disappearances 15 years ago. Dalziel had been one of the investigating officers on the case. The prime suspect, Benny Lightfoot, was never caught. The case is reopened when the disappearances begin again, and Dalziel finds the original cast of characters reassembled, with some in surprising new roles.
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