Killing the Lawyers
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A British PI novel from the Diamond Dagger Award–winning author: “Entertaining, sly, jokey . . . cynical, well written, and teems with sparkly dialogue” (The Times, London).
British private investigator Joe Sixsmith needs some help to resolve a dispute with his insurance company, so he turns to Luton, England’s most prominent law firm. But he winds up storming out, infuriated at the rude treatment he receives—which presents a problem once the firm’s partners start getting murdered soon afterward.
And as he tries to fend off the police who suspect him, he’s still got his own cases to juggle, including a plot against a female track star who may have to run for her life . . .
“Among mysterydom’s most unique and eccentric characters. Joe is a redundant British lathe operator, black, balding, decidedly middle-aged, and ever at the mercy of his curmudgeonly aunt Mirabelle and his nearly human cat, Whitey. . . . A blend of Chaplin and Clouseau, Joe Sixsmith is endearingly funny, but he also has an unerring knack for discovering some of life’s most serious truths in the midst of his bumbling misadventures.” —Booklist
“Joe is . . . an unpredictable, entertaining fellow.” —Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
All kinds of minor pleasures conspire in this third in the Joe Sixsmith series (Blood Sympathy; Born Guilty). Joe's a black PI in the not especially famous English town of Luton. He solves crimes less by detection than by his own brand of scrupulous honesty, which creates a kind of white light in which the bad guys invariably stand out. After Joe's insurance company undervalues his wrecked and beloved old car, he seeks the counsel of a rude and fancy lawyer. The visit ends in shouting--and becomes a case when the lawyer is murdered. Another lawyer in the dead man's firm is killed, and Joe, after being cleared as a suspect, is hired to investigate by a remaining partner in the firm. A concurrent case finds him hired on to investigate the threats being issued to Zak Oto, a woman runner who is being warned not to participate in the opening events of Luton's swank new sports complex. Zak has a close family, a jealous sister, a nasty Welsh bodyguard and the usual conniving collection of agents and coaches. All this happens close to the New Year, when Joe gets a lot of kisses at his favorite pub, and his cat gets drunk and sick (in that order). Hill is more famous for the Dalziel and Pascoe novels; his Sixsmith stories are of a different and somewhat lesser stripe. Joe is, nonetheless, a likable oddity, his own man, lucky rather than intuitive, not especially ambitious but loyal to a fault and an unpredictable, entertaining fellow.
