The Long Kill

When a hitman starts missing, it's time to retire. And where better than the Lake District where the air is healthy, the scenery spectacular, and there's a handsome young widow who's caught your eye?

Everything in this Garden of Eden seems lovely to Jaysmith. But soon he begins to discover, as many another retired man before him, that settling down to the quiet life is not as easy as it seems. His old employers aren't keen to lose him, his past is always lying in wait, and when Anya introduces him to her family, Jaysmith realizes there's no way out. He's back in business, and it makes little diffence that this time it's to defend, not destroy. However you wrap it up, his one accessable talent is The Long Kill.

Reginald Hill was born in Co. Durham and brought up in Cumberland where he now lives quietly with his wife, Pat, and not so quietly with their labrador bitch and two Siamese cats. A full-time writer since 1980, he has written over forty books and won prizes for individual novels (including the Crime Writers' Association's prestigious Gold Dagger Award for Best Crime Novel of the Year for Bones and Silence) and for short stories. In 1995 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger for his lifetime contribution to crime-writing. He spent many years as a teacher in Yorkshire which provided the inspiration and setting for the novels featuring the Falstaffian figure of Andy Dalziel, Head of Mid-Yorkshire CID, and his more sensitive sidekick, Peter Pascoe, whose adventures in the detective trade have been the basis of one of the most satisfying novel sequences of the modem age. Their popularity has been carried over into the hugely successful BBC television series featuring Warren Clarke and Colin Buchanan. The same qualities of style, pace, characterization and humour are evident in the books featuring his other series character, Joe Sixsmith, the likeable redundant lathe operator turned PI from Luton. Hill says he was delighted to win the Diamond Dagger because it finally confirmed he had made the right career choice and now he can really get down to it.