I often maintain I'd read a grocery list written by Reginald Hill and I really am not joking. I've been reading all of the reports about the latest Dalziel and Pascoe - A Cure for All Diseases and whilst I'm looking forward to it immensely I was also aware of a new Joe Sixsmith and I do like that series as well. Given nobody much is talking about it, I thought I'd pick up The Roar of the Butterflies.
The opening line:
"Joe Sixsmith was adrift in space."
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.