Singing the Sadness (First edition. Presentation copy)

'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. But only as far as Wales where they keep a welcome in the hillside and the Boyling Corner Choir has been invited to the Llanfugiol Choral Festival. Trouble is, no one seems to have heard of Llanfugiol. And instead of a welcome, all they find on the hillside is a burning house with a mysterious woman trapped inside. Add to this in rapid succession an aggressively suspicious policeman, a patronizing headmaster, a drug-dealing student, a gang of disaffected locals bent on sabotaging the festival, and a caretaker's daughter who seems ready to go to extraordinary lengths to take care of Joe, and what we have is the kind of criminous confusion which the famous Sixsmith detective technique soon turns to utter chaos. But Joe is no quitter. Doggedly, aided by little more than that instinct for truth which is his unique talent, he moves forward over the spae of a single weekend to uncover crimes which have been buried for years. Written with all its predecessors' humour and verve, Singing the Sadness takes Joe Sixsmith into a new dimension where morality is blurred and even the light of truth is only a very faint glimmer on a very dark hillside.

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.