Born Guilty - Hardcover

Hill, Reginald

3.86

272 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312130325 ISBN 13: 9780312130329

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1995

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Joe Sixsmith, quite possibly Britain's only black, balding, middle-aged, laid-off lathe operator-turned-private eye, met with deserving success in his debut last year in Blood Sympathy. His latest adventures in crime-solving land him in more trouble than he's ever known.
Sneaking through a graveyard to escape his maneuvering aunt after choir practice, Joe stumbles across a boy's corpse in a cardboard box - and that's just for starters. Soon Joe's casebook is more crowded than Karaoke Nite at his favorite pub. Retired colonial Mrs. Dora Calverley demands to know how the boy got in the box; wild young Gallie Hacker wants Joe to identify the stranger poking into her grandda's past; and Butcher, his friend from the legal aid society, is strangely keen to dig the dirt on a school bureaucrat's out-of-school activities.
Ever valiant for truth, Joe makes his mild-mannered way through Luton's mean streets, fighting off angry cops, demented druggies, and the matchmaking machinations of his Auntie Mirabelle. But the truth he discovers does not set him free, for there's little joy in confirming that today's kids grow up so much faster than he did, and that even the luckiest of them find out all too soon they have been born guilty.
With this book Reginald Hill confirms that Joe Sixsmith is here to stay. There may be prettier PIs and even wittier PIs, but Joe's down-to-earth humanity makes him look like the People's Choice for years to come.

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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.

From Booklist:

Hill has produced nearly three dozen novels, generating critical acclaim and a host of loyal fans who will find his newest hero, Joe Sixsmith, 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, who thrives on a diet of pork rinds and beer and keeps Joe on the straight and narrow. In his latest adventure, following Blood Sympathy , Joe leaves choir practice and takes a shortcut through the church graveyard, where he makes a grisly discovery--a young boy's body jammed into a box among the gravestones. Although the local coppers dismiss the case as an unfortunate drug overdose, Joe can't get the boy out of his mind. Poking and probing among the village's down-and-outs as well as its upper crust, Joe keeps at it until he discovers the shocking secrets of some of the town's most prominent citizens. 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. An outstanding read. Emily Melton

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