After a close encounter with a bomb, Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel recuperates at the Avalon Clinic in the quaint seaside resort of Sandytown. But soon he begins to suspect that those outside the convalescent home have just as many problems as the residents.
There's a psychiatrist with more to hide than his patients, a pair of powerful landowners with very different plans for putting the resort on the map, a Chinese acupuncturist with a Yorkshire accent, a skinny-dipping baronet and his ice-box sister, and a man from Dalziel's past who ought to be dead.
When someone actually does turn up dead, and under the most macabre circumstances, Chief Inspector Peter Pascoe is called onto the scene. Together again, Dalziel and Pascoe investigate a baffling and complex case as further corpses make it increasingly hard for Sandytown to justify its claim to be "Home of the Healthy Holiday." But it's certainly been put on the map. . . .
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Terrific, but be careful of the publishers' tricks:
A fine adventure of Dalziel's post-bombing recovery (in fact, better than the book he was "bombed" in), BUT it was/is published under two different titles!! "The Price of Butcher's Meat" is THE SAME BOOK as "A Cure for all Diseases" Don't be tricked into buying both (like me). In fact, I may sue HarperCollins and Doubleday for their cute little deception. (As if $26.95 is not enough for a story!) Maybe I'll toss Mr. Hill into the pot as well (he must have consented to the different covers/titles)... more info
The Fat Man Recuperates:
Reginald Hill can knock out a clean, taut procedural as well as anyone else. But as fans know, he can also mix and mutate the classic British cop story with any number of other literary genres in a way that no one else can. Here he cleverly blends a number of Mid-Yorkshire murders with an electronic-age take on diary and epistolary novels. Hill's not one to let his characters run in place developmentally, and here Dalziel grapples in his own inimitable fat-man fashion with aging and his own near-demise. All... more info
Spin on Austen:
This book is clever and terrific. It is a take-off on Jane Austen's "Sandition". Sandition was never completed by Austen, but was finished by "another woman", quite nicely. Hill did a great job giving a modern twist to an Austen story.
boring as h...:
I was shocked to realize this book was utterly Boring. I love Reg Hill but this was awful. Could barely get through it.
