Reginald Hill

Joe Sixsmith, Luton's biggest crime buster, heads off to Wales for a choral festival, but finds a burning house with a mysterious woman trapped inside. Along with a suspicious policeman, a drug-dealing student and local sabotage of the festival, Sixmith's detection technique adds to the confusion.

'One of Britain's most consistently excellent crime novelists' Marcel Berlins, The Times '[Reginald Hill] keeps one on the edge of one's wits throughout a bitterly enthralling detection thriller' Sunday Times

PI can mean many things, but can it really mean a balding, middle-aged, redundant lathe-operator from a high-rise in Luton? Joe Sixsmith thinks it can. His Aunt Mirabelle thinks you'd have to be crazy to hire him and Joe's current clients certainly fit the bill.

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'

'These novels last, like a grand malt whisky - rounded, rich, intoxicating ... Here is an author at his formidable best' Frances Hegarty, Mail on Sunday

Hurrying out of St Monkey's church on the last Amen of the Creation, Joe Sixsmith stumbles across a boy's corpse in a cardboard box and into more trouble than he's ever known.