Singing the Sadness
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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’ Sunday Times
Joe Sixsmith is going west, though only as far the Llanffugiol Choral Festival in Wales. But his plans are interrupted when they happen upon a burning house with a mysterious woman trapped inside.
Joe risks life and limb to rescue the woman, only to be roped in to the investigation by the police officer in charge. Suddenly surrounded by a bevy of suspicious characters, he soon realizes that this case is much more than just arson.
Aided by little more than his acute instinct for truth, Joe moves forward over the space of a single weekend to uncover crimes which have been buried for years.
Reviews
‘Hill is an instinctive and complete novelist who is blessed with a spontaneous storytelling gift’
Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday
‘Reginald Hill stands head and shoulders above any other writer of homebred crime fiction’
Observer
‘This is high-speed pantomine… with plenty of sly dialogue to spice the action’
Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday (of Singing the Sadness)
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 promise.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hill could not have created a protagonist more different from his gruff, hard-drinking, profane Andy Dalziel than Joe Sixsmith, the hero of his second series of mysteries (Killing the Lawyers, etc.). A PI without the large body and presence of Dalziel, Sixsmith is "five foot five, a sagging waist and social invisibility except maybe in a convention of white supremacists." Sixsmith is black. That does make him a standout figure when he leaves Luton, England, to journey with the Boyling Corner Chapel choir to Wales for the remote and unheralded Llanffugiol Choral Festival. But Joe's usual self-effacement is ruined when he rescues a nude woman from a burning cottage in the countryside. Thrust out of the choral competition by the injuries he receives in the fire, Joe is driven into a far deadlier competition. Who is the woman he rescued, and how did she come to be in the supposedly unoccupied cottage? Joe is hired by the owner of the cottage to find the answers; and he secretly gets a second retainer from the man's wife, who suspects the woman from the fire is her husband's mistress. Joe's adventures and misadventures among the provincial Welsh folk and their more sophisticated police officers and academics are absorbing and dangerous. Sixsmith's fourth outing lacks the brilliant byplay that distinguishes the Dalziel/Pascoe novels, but the characterizations remain sharp. And Hill's swift pacing and keen dialogue make his modest, intelligent hero a winner in this intriguing tale of the seedy side of small-town life.
