A rainy November night in Yorkshire and three elderly men lie dead.

One lies in his own bathtub, bleeding from a deliberate and vicious attack.

One lies on the ground in a rain-soaked park, with no obvious cause of death bar a head-wound of indeterminate origin.

One lies in the road alongside his mangled bicycle, a victim of a collision with a car.

All cases that would normally involve Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel and Detective Inspector Peter Pascoe, but this time Pascoe is leading the team himself. Because the driver of the car involved in the fatal collision may well have been an exceedingly drunk Dalziel…

This is the eighth Dalziel and Pascoe novel, and my book club has decided to venture well outside of the Golden Age into the realms of the British police procedural. This one was my suggestion, as I have fond memories of the series and seemed to remember this one as being particularly strong. Is it? Well, perhaps the memory has cheated a tad.

It suffers from something that irks me more these days than it used to, namely the lack of focus on one particular crime. Here the focus is old age and the perils that it entails, rather than one specific murder, and while some of the stories, particularly that of the man in the park, are heart-breaking, these days I certainly prefer one big mystery with side-plots. Nothing here has the sense of being the “main” story, and while this is hardly a deal-breaker, it’s not something that I prefer.

The bigger problem is the lack of Dalziel. For me, he is the star of the series and Pascoe is someone I put up with, but due to him being persuaded to take a short holiday, the focus of most of the investigation is on Pascoe (and, it seems, his sexual appetite, eyeing up a potential witness inappropriately and being more concerned when meeting up with his wife while she is looking after her elderly father with how soon they can shag). He’s just not that interesting a character – Sergeant Wield is, but he’s mostly just standing around. The book lifts when Dalziel is taking centre stage, but those episodes are few and far between.

Best read as part of the series – this is a well-written tale with some good humour, but it needed the star to be centre-stage, not off in the wings having another pint.