Born Guilty — Reginald Hill

Joe Sixsmith, quite possibly Britain's only black, balding, middle-aged, laid-off lathe operator-turned-private eye, met with deserving success in his debut last year in Blood Sympathy. His latest adventures in crime-solving land him in more trouble than he's ever known. Sneaking through a graveyard to escape his maneuvering aunt after choir practice, Joe stumbles across a boy's corpse in a cardboard box - and that's just for starters. Soon Joe's casebook is more crowded than Karaoke Nite at his favorite pub. Retired colonial Mrs. Dora Calverley demands to know how the boy got in the box; wild young Gallie Hacker wants Joe to identify the stranger poking into her grandda's past; and Butcher, his friend from the legal aid society, is strangely keen to dig the dirt on a school bureaucrat's out-of-school activities. Ever valiant for truth, Joe makes his mild-mannered way through Luton's mean streets, fighting off angry cops, demented druggies, and the matchmaking machinations of his Auntie Mirabelle. But the truth he discovers does not set him free, for there's little joy in confirming that today's kids grow up so much faster than he did, and that even the luckiest of them find out all too soon they have been born guilty. With this book Reginald Hill confirms that Joe Sixsmith is here to stay. There may be prettier PIs and even wittier PIs, but Joe's down-to-earth humanity makes him look like the People's Choice for years to come.