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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Perfect summer read - and great for winter too!,
This review is from: The Roar of the Butterflies (Hardcover)
Most readers know Reginald Hill for his Dalziel and Pascoe books, and very good they are too. The Joe Sexsmith series showcases the lighter side of this wonderful crime writer. In this book Sexsmith, a somewhat tubby middle-aged black PI, is asked to help a popular local golf-club member fight the allegation that he cheated during an important match. Sounds like a minor problem to Joe, but while investigating the incident he turns up something much nastier. I'm not a golfer myself and though the game of golf is front and centre in the plot I had no trouble following along as any arcane terms were subtly explained. Joe's lissome nurse girlfriend, his cat Whitey, and a forceful, jealous boxer are just a few of the beautifully described and very funny characters in this book, while the plot is so gripping that I literally could not put it down. This is a wonderful read for a summer's afternoon - but beware. Supper could be late!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Joe Sixsmith rules the links,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Roar of the Butterflies (Joe Sixsmith) (Kindle Edition)
Well, actually Joe doesn't golf. He's just a guy trying to scratch out a living as a private investigator during a hot summer in the Midlands, without alienating his fiance. Suddenly his services are in demand from the well-born (Christian Porphyry, scion of the local gentry who's accused of cheating at golf) and the shadowy (the local crime czar known as "King Rat"), and Joe is sweating from more than the ambient air temperature.
But in typical Joe fashion, he doesn't overthink things. Joe just follows his nose and does the next logical thing in front of him - in this case visiting Porphyry's exclusive golf club under a dubious cover created by the client and dealing with what happens next. Joe's up against some very resourceful characters from high society to low. But he's not without resources, and he pulls off a few surprises of his own. One of these days I will re-read this book to look for examples of Reginald Hill's clever wordplay, which I'm sure are there and which I know I missed while following the flow of the narrative. It was a good read and a great escape.
7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
So lightweight it almost floats away,
By
This review is from: The Roar of the Butterflies (Hardcover)
The title of this book comes from a description of a golfer's woes by P. G. Wodehouse. This is one of the few books I know that seems lightweight when compared to any of Wodehouse's airy confections.
Most reader's probably know Reginald Hill from his excellent series about Superintendent (Fat Andy) Dalziel and his subordinate, the potentially high-flying Pascoe, who is steadily moving up in rank. If you are such a reader, forget all you know. Joe Sixsmith is neither a Dalziel nor a Pascoe. In fact, it's a bit hard for me to accept the notion that one man, Hill, actually wrote two such different series. Sixsmith is not exactly a protagonist. He is a lucky drifter through the eddies and tides of the genre PI novel. He starts off in good approved form, sitting in his office without a client in sight and not doing much about that deplorable state. Into his office comes an unlikely client, who hires him and winds up the clockwork plot. A couple of hundred pages later, the ticking ends and we find Sixsmith triumphant, sort of, in his not too bright, not too active, lucky way. It's fluff, but not bad fluff, although there is a melodramatic sequence near the end that applies a harder edge to the story than is absolutely necessary. Wodehouse could and did write crime stories that not only smiled but positively beamed from end to end. "The Roar of the Butterflies" would have been a better book if it, too, had smiled a little more. This book offers a perfectly acceptable reading experience--provided that there is absolutely nothing else at hand. Three stars. LEC/AM/8-08
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