'One of Britain's most consistently excellent crime novelists' The Times '[Reginald Hill] keeps one on the edge of one's wits throughout a bitterly enthralling detection thriller' Sunday Times When a hitman starts missing, it's time to retire. And where better than the Lake District where the air is healthy, the scenery spectacular, and there's a handsome young widow who's caught your eye. Everything in this Garden of Eden seems lovely to Jaysmith. But soon he begins to discover, as many another retired man before him, that settling down to the quiet life is not as easy as it seems. His old employers aren't keen to lose him, his past is always lying in wait, and when Anya introduces him to her family, Jaysmith realizes there's no way out. He's back in business, and it makes little difference that this time it's to defend, not destroy. However you wrap it up, his one accessible talent is The Long Kill.

Author Biography

Reginald Hill was brought up in Cumbria, and has returned there after many years in Yorkshire. With his first crime novel, A Clubbable Woman, he was hailed as 'the crime novel's best hope' and twenty years on he has more than fulfilled that prophecy.