Something about a Will: Child's Play (1987), by Reginald Hill

Reginald Hill's death at the beginning of 2012 received less attention from the major presses than did the deaths of "Crime Queens" PD James and Ruth Rendell in 2014 and 2015, but most fans of modern British mystery, I believe, would readily include Hill in the ranks of the very best crime writers from the last half-century (see this nice 2012 piece by Mike Ripley in the Guardian).

Hill's first novel about Superintendent Dalziel and Inspector Pascoe, A Clubbable Woman, appeared way back in 1970.  Between that year and 1984 he published eight well-received D&P detective novels, but I think the period from 1987-1990 represented an advance in his work, with his writing attaining greater depth, while not sacrificing the formal puzzle aspect.

In those years Hill published three novels: Child's Play (1987), Underworld (1988) and Bones and Silence (1990).  Over the next dozen years Hill produced what I think are some of the very finest modern examples of the mystery form, including Pictures of Perfection (1994), On Beulah Height (1998) and Dialogues of the Dead (2002).

Over the next few weeks I want to look at a pair of these novels, starting, I hope very soon, with Child's Play, a book that involves so many classic elements, including a rich old woman's will, a pack of disgruntled relatives and the return of a missing heir, vanished during the Second World War. But is the man really the heir, or an impostor?  There's lots for the classic mystery fan to like here.

Reginald Hill
https://robertarood.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/reginald-hill/