Hill, Reginald. The Woodcutter.

NY: HarperCollins, 2011.

Hill is best known for his British crime novels featuring Detective Superintendent Dalziel and DI Pascoe, which won him a Golden Dagger and also the Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award. But he has also done a few standalone thrillers that are quite different. This one is a revenge story of high quality. Sir Wilf Hadda — known to his friends and the tabloid press as “Wolf,” a sobriquet that really suits him — is a multi-millionaire Master of the World with a beautiful wife and a daughter, but his roots are not what you might expect. His father was Head Forester on a heavily wooded estate in Cumbria and Wolf was swinging an ax as soon as he could walk.

Keen, Greg. Soho Dead.

Seattle: Thomas & Mercer, 2017.

Kenny Gabriel is a couple years short of his sixtieth birthday and with less than three hundred quid in the bank. He’s a creature of Soho, having lived and worked in that London neighborhood since supposedly going off to university in the mid-’70s, and both he and Soho have changed over the years. He’s a skip-tracer most of the time, working for a corpulent, agoraphobic computer nerd who hasn’t left his flat in a decade.

Cameron, Iain. One Last Lesson.

np: CreateSpace, 2014.

Angus Henderson is a Detective Inspector down in Sussex, having apparently left the North under a cloud. He’s a homicide specialist with the usual team of subordinates and access to all the latest SOCO techniques and equipment. He has a yacht (a very small one), a journalist girlfriend who drives fast cars, a guitarist brother who joined the army, a boss who wants to insinuate a buddy onto Henderson’s team, and a rather scruffy flat, and he hates golf and tartan hats. Actually, that’s just the tip of the list.

Hill, Reginald. A Pinch of Snuff.

NY: Harper, 1978.

In the last book of the “Superintendent Dalziel” series, Andy Dalziel pretty much had the story to himself, DI Peter Pascoe having departed on his honeymoon. In this fifth offering, the opposite is the case. Pascoe is visiting his dentist, Dr. Shorter, and after the filling is tapped in, he’s asked to have a drink and give some advice.