Blood Sympathy
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- €8.99
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- €8.99
Publisher Description
‘Reginald Hill stands head and shoulders above any other writer of homebred crime fiction’ Observer
PI can mean many things, but can it really mean a balding, middle-aged lathe operator from a high rise in Luton? Joe Sixsmith thinks it can.
His Aunt Mirabelle thinks you’d have to be crazy to hire him, and Joe’s current clients certainly fit the bill. One’s confessing to the brutal murder of his whole family; another thinks she’s a witch. Next to them, the two heavies who believe Joe is hiding their illicit drugs seem almost normal.
As Joe stumbles his way through bodies, gangsters and hostile police officers, he is protected by a combination of sheer luck and the help of a new lady friend. And soon it seems like he might just surpass everyone’s expectations…
Reviews
‘Splendid moments in this entertaining mystery’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A thoroughly engaging investigator’
TLS
‘Few writers in the genre today have Hill’s gifts: formidable intelligence, quick humour, compassion and a prose style that blends elegance and grace’
Donna Leon, Sunday Times
‘Reginald Hill’s novels are really dances to the music of time’
Ian Rankin
‘The best crime novel of the year’
Natasha Cooper, The Times (of On Beulah Height)
About the author
Reginald Hill was brought up in Cumbria, and has returned there after many years in Yorkshire. With his first crime novel, A Clubbable Woman, he was hailed as ‘the crime novel’s best hope’ and twenty years on he has more than fulfilled that prophecy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hill's newest detective is Joe Sixsmith, a fat, black, balding lathe operator declared redundant in Thatcherite England. Middle-aged, likable Joe has set himself up as a PI in Luton, Bedfordshire, although all he knows about the profession is what he learned from the movies. Joe, who loves his alcoholic cat Whitey, blunders his way through a nearly indescribable plot that begins with the gory slaughter of a family of four and includes a plane crash, voodoo, seduction by an alleged witch, dope smuggling and racial clashes. And the hero gets the girl in the end. What Joe has going for him is serendipity and empathy; the plot is just there for laughs. Hill has written 23 previous novels, most starring his other admirable, entertaining series heroes, cops Dalziel and Pascoe.
