I bought this on the recommendation of one of my correspondents; I’m glad
I did.

A Pince of Snuff is a gritty police procedural set in England; it
features a pair of directives, Detective-Superintendant Andrew Dalziel,
and his subordinate Detective-Inspector Peter Pascoe. It reminds me of
Peter Lovesey’s
Peter Diamond series, in an inverted sort of
way. Diamond is fat, gruff, and given to plain speaking; so is Dalziel.
Diamond is an old school detective; so is Dalziel. Diamond has a younger
subordinate who’s gotten special training in new ways of doing things; so
had Dalziel. Diamond frequently has to put his subordinate in his place;
so does Dalziel. Diamond finally puts all of the pieces together; so does
Dalziel.

The difference is, Peter Lovesey’s books are written from Diamond’s point
of view; Hill is writing (in this book, anyway) from the subordinate’s
point of view. There’s an interesting complementarity here. The other
main difference is that Lovesey gets more into the heads of the other
characters than Hill does; and Hill is correspondingly more gritty, as is
hinted at by the title–A Pinch of Snuff as in “snuff films”.

I’ve been told that no genuine snuff film has yet been found by the
authorities, though they loom large in urban legendry thanks to books
like this one. If you’re fortunate enough not to have encountered the
term, I think that I won’t enlighten you; a Google search will likely
tell you more than you want to know.

That said, the details in Hill’s book aren’t nearly as disturbing
as those in Lawrence
Block’s Matthew Scudder novel (I forget the name) that involved
snuff films. Or, for that matter, as disturbing as An Exchange of
Hostages, which I reviewed last month.

I tend to prefer mysteries more toward the “cozy” end of the spectrum,
and I’ll admit that I enjoy Peter Diamond more than Dalziel and Pascoe.
Nevertheless, this is a good police procedural and I enjoyed it. I’m
looking forward to reading more of Hill’s work.