Singing the Sadness: A Private Eye Joe Sixsmith Mystery - Hardcover

Hill, Reginald

3.78

357 ratings by Goodreads

9780312242381: Singing the Sadness: A Private Eye Joe Sixsmith Mystery

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312242387 ISBN 13: 9780312242381

Publisher: Minotaur Books, 1999

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

While traveling through Wales with his church choir, Black private eye Joe Sixsmith rescues a naked woman from a burning cottage and is then secretly recruited by the building's owner, then his wife, to find out what happened

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Reginald Hill is a British writer best known for his award-winning Dalziel and Pascoe novels, which have been made into a successful BBC television series. He lives in Cumbria, England, where he writes full-time.

From 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, [with] 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. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.