Hill's tall tale

Good Morning, Midnight, by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins, £12)

Tony Blair has a good deal to answer for. It's not so much that he took the country to war on false pretences, as the effect of this on crime fiction. Authors are scurrying to incorporate the event in their plots, only too often allowing righteous indignation to triumph over creative instinct.

Of course, Reginald Hill is far too intelligent and too subtle a writer to engage in tub-thumping polemics, but the subject is still there in Good Morning, Midnight, distorting the novel's gravitational field with its mass. Which is a pity, since this account of the investigation, by the Mid-Yorkshire police, of the apparent suicide of Palinurus Maciver - a carbon copy of his father's death 10 years earlier - is in every other respect as absorbing and as enjoyable as anything Reginald Hill has produced.

The writing is brilliant, witty and erudite: the literary presence behind the novel is Emily Dickinson, one of whose poems provides the title; the sharply etched characters are memorably individual - the eccentric, bird-loving Lavinia Maciver, the deceased's aunt, is particularly successful; and Mid-Yorkshire's finest are on top form: if Andy Dalziel is beginning to show his age, revealing an unexpected streak of sentimentality, Pascoe has grown into his rank, acquiring gravitas and authority. And young Bowler is, with Lavinia's help, at last getting over the death of his girlfriend.

The intrusion of the machinations of the CIA thus comes as something of a disappointment.