Joe Sixsmith

Joe Sixsmith has lost his job as a lathe operator-and is in the process of losing his hair, too-but that doesn't mean he's going to sink into a midlife crisis. Instead he decides to start a new career as a private investigator, with his grumpy, pork rind–eating cat, Whitey, at his side. To his surprise, there's no shortage of work, and before he knows it he's dealing with murder, drugs, and thugs-not to mention the meddlesome matchmaking attempts of his aunt Mirabelle.

As he leaves St Monkey's after choir practice, PI Joe Sixsmith makes a heartbreaking discovery in the church graveyard: the body of a boy in a cardboard box. The police think it's just another drug overdose, another homeless kid who's become a casualty of the streets. But Joe can't get this death out of his mind. Though his casebook is already full, he's intent on taking a look around Luton to learn the truth. But as usual, he has to elude his matchmaking aunt Mirabelle at the same time . . .

British PI Joe Sixsmith needs some help to resolve a dispute with his insurance company, so he turns to Luton, England's most prominent law firm. But he winds up storming out, infuriated at the rude treatment he receives-which presents a problem once the firm's partners start getting murdered soon afterward. And as he tries to fend off the police who suspect him, he's still got his own cases to juggle, including a plot against a female track star who may have to run for her life . . .

It looks to be a melodious weekend for Joe Sixsmith and his chapel choir. They're headed for the first annual choral festival in Llanffugiol, a village said to be the heart of musical life in rural Wales. But the locals are far from welcoming in this off-the-map hamlet where dread lingers as heavy as the mist. Never more so than when Joe comes to the rescue of a naked amnesiac screaming for her life in a burning cottage. No one claims to know her, or what she was doing on a stranger's property, much less why anyone would want to set her ablaze. Secretly recruited by the owner of the cottage to investigate and, oddly enough, just as surreptitiously by the man's wife, Joe soon discovers that arson is the least of the burning secrets in Llanffugiol.

Laid-off lathe operator-turned-private investigator Joe Sixsmith is suddenly very popular, and not just with the ladies. Though he doesn't know a putter from a nine iron, he's being implored to come to the rescue of one Christian Porphyry, the scion of the upper-crust family that owns the most exclusive country club in Luton. Porphyry faces expulsion for the heinous crime of cheating at golf. Inexplicably, political boss/crime czar "King Rat" Ratcliffe is also interested in employing Joe, offering him some very attractive surveillance work in sunny Spain. But Sixsmith's more intrigued by the first case, especially when a possible witness to the alleged indiscretion mysteriously vanishes. It's not unusual for Joe to feel out of his depth, but this time he feels out of his class too. Suddenly he faces a potentially fatal pummeling from a variety of sources-and is in grave peril of discovering just how dangerous a contact sport golf can be.