Born Guilty
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
‘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
Hurrying out of St Monkey’s church one day, Joe Sixsmith stumbles across a boy’s corpse in a cardboard box and into more trouble than he’s ever known.
His casebook is full to bursting: retired colonial Mrs C. demands to know how the boy got there; Gallie, the Mutant from Outer Space, urges him to find the stranger nosing into her granddad’s past; while Butcher, that briefest of briefs, is hellbent on digging the dirt on a deputy head’s out-of-school activities.
Joe threads his way through the mean streets of Luton, fighting off cops, druggies and the matchmaking machinations of his Auntie Mirabelle. But there’s little joy to be found in the truth: that kids grow up fast, and that even the luckiest ones are born guilty.
Reviews
‘He pays attention to the old-fashioned values: meticulous plotting, authentic characterisation and realistic dialogue’
The Times
‘Reginald Hill stands head and shoulders above any other writer of homebred crime fiction’
Observer
‘Reginald Hill’s novels are really dances to the music of time’
Ian Rankin
‘He is first and foremost an instinctive and complete novelist who is blessed with a spontaneous storytelling gift’
Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday
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
In Pictures of Perfection, 1994's Dalziel/Pascoe mystery, Hill conjured up a nearly faultless puzzle with virtually no crime and no dead folks. Less successful is this, the second in his series starring laconic, balding, middle-aged Joe Sixsmith, a black detective in the gritty English town of Luton. Joe has an old suit, an old cat, a young lover and an aunt who wishes he would settle down with a nice girl. Joe sings with the church choir, sips Guinness in a bar full of Gary Glitter fans and stumbles into cases. These involve a dead homeless boy, a high-ranking cop's wife accused of sexual harassment and a relative of Joe's girl who might just be a war criminal. Hill is lamentably slapdash with all three plot threads, and the whole thing quickly deteriorates into provincial coyness. Those who have never listened to Gary Glitter or been anywhere near Luton won't get many of the jokes-but, on the other hand, they can bless their luck, as both are truly grim. A petition demanding that Hill stick to Dalziel/Pascoe capers or the psychological chillers he pens as Patrick Ruell might be in order.
