Stir in a copper’s dangerous liaison with a rentboy, a treasure hoard belonging to a family of local aristocrats and some weird mental activity on the part of a major female character, and we should have an absorbing tale, in part a sequel to Hill’s previous book featuring the “Wordman” puzzler.The problem is that Hill has grown much too indulgent to his two leading policemen, too persuaded that they are as fascinating to the reader as to the author. It’s a danger facing many crime fiction writers who feature the same detectives in book after book. Courageous authors take the Reichenbach Falls solution, kill off their Sherlocks and try something new. A couple of years ago, in On Beulah Height, Hill had the balance right, focusing on child murder, the tragic and believable theme of that book, rather than on the personalities of the investigators.But here, narrative and character development are impeded at every turn by DS Dalziel and DCI Pascoe, now a dreary old pair of plonkers who pop up as soon as a chase gets under way or a minor personality threatens to become interesting. I longed for them to stay out of it so that their young sergeants could get on with investigative duties, but the two have been promoted way beyond their capacity to entertain, though not to interfere.The Beddoes plot, which should be a gripping interwoven narrative, is retailed in the improbable form of letters written to Pascoe, a device that deprives the story of any suspense, rather like firing burning arrows into wads of wet Kleenex.

Elsewhere, just as an important female character is revealing absorbing emotional depths, in comes the pantomime figure of Dalziel, with his programmed vocabulary of bugger, bollocks, tripe and onions, to deprive the episode of anything but clich?Surely not even in deepest Yorkshire can Dalziel’s utterly predictable political incorrectness still pass as entertaining, nor his inadequacy with women be regarded as some sort of bold anti-feminist statement. He’s an irritating character who urgently needs cutting down to size. Castration would be a start.The reviewer’s new crime novel, ‘In the Kingdom of Mists’, is published by Doubleday in July. Much as it pains me to undermine the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in any way, I think there is a fatal flaw in their surprisingly mild strictures on with-profits providers.

Despite trailing “a wide-ranging programme of actions to improve the governance and transparency of with-profits funds”, what it actually proposes is pretty tame. Aimed firmly at the millions of people who want to invest directly on the stock market but do not know how, its big selling point is that the commission will be only £1.50, a price Halifax guarantees to hold for at least a year. That has set a few jaws dropping among other low-cost brokers, who generally charge around £10 a time.But there is one big snag. To make the service economic, investors can buy only on one of four dates each month so Halifax can lump lots of small orders together. Customers can cancel their order up to 10 o’clock the previous night, but they cannot set a limit by stating that they will not pay more than a certain price.Sue Concannon, managing director of Halifax share dealing, says that if there is some cataclysmic event which rocks the market – such as the 11 September terrorist attacks – Halifax will at its discretion scrap the orders.That may be fine for most customers most of the time – and Halifax does want people to put in so much a month to benefit from pound-cost averaging – but it is a major drawback for investors who like keen prices.On the other hand, one of the service’s hidden advantages is that customers can opt to have dividends reinvested.