Born Guilty (Joe Sixsmith, Book 2)

(Paperback)

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Few writers in the genre today have Hills gifts: formidable intelligence, quick humour, compassion and a prose style that blends elegance and grace Donna Leon, Sunday Times
Hurrying out of St Monkeys church one day, Joe Sixsmith stumbles across a boys corpse in a cardboard box and into more trouble than hes ever known.

His casebook is full to bursting: retired colonial Mrs C. demands to know how the boy got there; Gallie, the Mutant from Outer Space, urges him to find the stranger nosing into her granddads past; while Butcher, that briefest of briefs, is hellbent on digging the dirt on a deputy heads out-of-school activities.

Joe threads his way through the mean streets of Luton, fighting off cops, druggies and the matchmaking machinations of his Auntie Mirabelle. But theres little joy to be found in the truth: that kids grow up fast, and that even the luckiest ones are born guilty.

Reviews

He pays attention to the old-fashioned values: meticulous plotting, authentic characterisation and realistic dialogue
The Times

Reginald Hill stands head and shoulders above any other writer of homebred crime fiction
Observer

Reginald Hills novels are really dances to the music of time
Ian Rankin

He is first and foremost an instinctive and complete novelist who is blessed with a spontaneous storytelling gift
Frances Fyfield, Mail on Sunday

Author Bio

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 novels best hope and thirty years on he has more than fulfilled that prophecy.