Singing the Sadness

By Reginald Hill

‘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, though only as far the Llanffugiol Choral Festival in Wales. But his plans are interrupted when they happen upon a burning house with a mysterious woman trapped inside.

Joe risks life and limb to rescue the woman, only to be roped in to the investigation by the police officer in charge. Suddenly surrounded by a bevy of suspicious characters, he soon realizes that this case is much more than just arson.

Aided by little more than his acute instinct for truth, Joe moves forward over the space of a single weekend to uncover crimes which have been buried for years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Sep 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9780007389179

Reginald Hill

Reginald Hill, acclaimed English crime writer, was a native of Cumbria and a former resident of Yorkshire, the setting for his novels featuring Superintendent Andy Dalziel and DCI Peter Pascoe. Their appearances won Hill numerous awards, including a CWA Golden Dagger and the Cartier Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award. The Dalziel and Pascoe stories were also adapted into a hugely popular BBC TV series. Hill died in 2012.

Reviews for Singing the Sadness

[therestlessmouse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I like Joe Sixsmith, the main character. Parts of this book were a bit too introspective and made it bog down for me, esp. with the regional flavor and dialect which is a good thing but slows down the reading while I puzzle things out. I am sorry to hear about the the passing of Mr. Hill, he was a good writer.

[vivl_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have enormous affection for PI Joe Sixsmith. I like his modesty, his kindness, his humour, his bumbling method of solving crimes (personally I think he has more skill than he believes he does), the fact that the strongest language he will use is "shoot" despite his dedication to the teachings of a hard-boiled US detective whose name escapes me and last but not least the immensely entertaining regular secondary characters, particularly his feisty Aunt Mirabelle and cynical cat Whitey. Sadly, in this novel Whitey is left back in Luton while Joe gets into predictable levels of strife in the wild west, i.e. Wales.Perhaps that's why I'm only awarding 3.5 stars. I miss Whitey. The story, while entertaining and engaging, is not as uniformly gripping as much of Reginald Hill's other work.Nevertheless, I'm saddened by the awareness that due to the death of Mr Hill, this is the penultimate Joe Sixsmith novel. I might hold off on the last one for a while so as not to really have to say goodbye too soon.

[edwardsgt · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A Joe Sixsmith novel, where he travles to Wales for singing contest and gets dragged into all kinds of scrapes. Usual Reg Hill quality writing, without the sometimes showy prose of his Dalziel & Pascoe novels.