John Harvey (1)

Cold in Hand by John Harvey is the 11th book in his Charlie Resnick series and some time has passed in the timing of the story. Charlie is getting ever closer to retirement age and is beginning to think and make plans for the event. He sees no great change as his life partner, Lynn Kellogg is quite a bit younger than him and still has her police career in front of her. Charlie and Lynn, who used to work together, now live together in a relationship that both are very happy in.

The first half show more of the book deals with how Lynn, stepping between two fighting teens, comes into the line of a bullet. Luckily she was wearing her safety vest, but one of the girls dies from her wounds. While Lynn is sidelined and recovering, Charlie is asked to work this case and help find who the shooter was, and who was actually being targeted - Lynn or the teen girl. While this case is on-going Lynn returns to work and gets more deeply involved in another of her murder cases. This one concerns a massage worker who had her throat slit in a sleazy parlour. This case involves some very nasty characters, Serbians, who also are gun runners. Lynn’s top priority is to protect the witnesses in this case, but then the trial is postponed and the suspect is given bail on the direction of Stuart Daines of the Serious Organized Crime Agency who warns Lynn off and obviously wants these criminals on the street so his gun-running case will gain traction.

As always, John Harvey excels in his gritty plotting. His eye for the details of police politics and his ability to deliver stories that seem to have come right from newspaper headlines bring a sense of reality to his police procedurals. In Cold in Hand, we also see Charlie at his lowest which helps to develop this well crafted character even further. I know the next book is the last in the series and I am both looking forward to the read and dreading the end of this favourite series. show less

John Harvey will be eighty later this year and has said that henceforth he will confine his literary output to short stories, and will not write any more novels. An understandable decision, perhaps, but it is a shame as this latest (last?) one shows that he is still at the top of his game.

Harvey is best known, of course, for the marvellous series of crime novels set in and around Nottingham and featuring the melancholic cat- and jazz-loving Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, brought to show more life on the small screen by Tom Wilkinson. He has, however, written a number of other novels, including a shorter series featuring Frank Elder who, after a long and uneventful career as a sergeant in London, had moved to Nottingham on promotion to Inspector, although the novels recount his exploits after taking early retirement and fleeing the job and a failed marriage and relocating in Cornwall.

Like Resnick, Elder is no stranger to melancholy and self-doubt, both characteristics being exacerbated by the events related in Ash and Bone, in which his daughter Katherine (Kate) is abducted and then raped. Kate also features at the heart of this new novel. Several years on from the awful incidents referred to above, she is now living in a flat share in London, living largely from hand to mouth and working as an artist’s model. The artist, who is on the cusp of establishing himself as one of the biggest names in his field, seems obsessed by Kate, and they drift into an uncomfortable relationship which gradually becomes unwholesome, if not exactly abusive. Having had enough, Kate ends the relationship but is ill suited to cope with the consequent emotional upheaval.

Having been all but estranged from Kate (through her choice rather than his), Frank welcomes the opportunity to come back into her life when she comes to visit him in Cornwall, although the reunion is short-lived. After the briefest of visits, she returns suddenly to London. Her emotional fragility is then further challenged when the artist is found brutally murdered in his studio, and she is, unavoidably, cast as one of the prime suspects. Franks comes back to offer whatever support he can, and seems to be making headway, bringing Kate back to a degree of emotional stability.

At this point, however, following a bizarre accident, the man who had abducted and abused her all those years ago escapes from prison.

Harvey brings all these threads together with great ease, making it all flow so much more coherently than my synopsis above. He is a past master at the police procedural, and knows how to convey sharp, plausible dialogue, and to develop tight, concise plots. This is certainly a strong note on which to bow out, although I hope he might let himself be persuaded to return to his keyboard again very soon. show less

This is the first book I've read by John Harvey, the famous British crime novelist. It won't be the last. The man certainly knows how to tell a story and keep you awake while he does it.

I'm delighted to find that he writes about characters who could have inhabited the TV series "The Bill" in its early days, with old fashioned police work and solid, hard working policemen and women.

Frank Elder is a retired Detective Inspector, living a lonely, solitary life in Cornwall. His wife has divorced show more him and remarried, and his teenaged daughter is still bitterly resentful that, through his work connections, she was abducted and raped. When forty-something Detective Sergeant Maddy Birch is raped and murdered. Frank is drawn back to the force as a consultant. This story follows his investigation, his difficult family life, as well as the lives of various secondary characters who are affected by the crime he's investigating.

The author draws a very skilful plot with two believable suspects vying for the role of Maddy’s murderer at the same time, and more than a hint of some very nasty police corruption.

Harvey has delivered a page turning plot, sensitively written relationships and a true sense of haunting fear and terror throughout. A truly intelligent crime novel! show less

Published thirty years ago, this was the first novel by John Harvey, and introduced his principal protagonist, Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick. Having grown up in the East Midlands, I was particularly drawn by the Resnick stories and their Nottingham setting. Just as with Ian Rankin’s books featuring Inspector Rebus, these stories featured real settings – places that I knew, and had visited myself, and could readily recognise from Harvey’s description.

Of course, it is customary show more now for fictional detectives to display certain quirks. Resnick is a lugubrious character, with quirks in abundance. He is almost obsessed with coffee, struggling in those days before the proliferation of high street coffee bars to find an espresso that is even vaguely palatable He is also very particular in his choice of sandwiches, which represent his staple for lunch, using a select handful of delicatessens that can satisfy his rigorous demands. He is also a keen adherent of traditional jazz, and has four cats, each named after a jazz maestro.

There is a strong undercurrent of melancholy throughout the novels (which goes beyond Resnick’s support of Notts County Football Club, although that in itself might well be sufficient source of melancholia to be going on with). As this novel opens, Resnick is giving evidence in the trial of a man charged with abusing his young daughter. This is peripheral to the main plot, but somehow sets the tone of all that follows. Resnick is oppressed by the knowledge that he is fighting a losing battle against the ravages of crime, and his feeling of despair seems to permeate the whole book.

The main plot concerns the murder of a young woman who is believed to have been killed by her former partner who had a history of violence. While he is in custody, however, another, similar murder occurs. The police have to reconfigure their approach, and we are left wondering whether a serial killer might be working in Nottingham.

Harvey writes marvellously – indeed, he is also an established poet and publisher in his own right – and his plots are soundly constructed. This is not a jolly book, but it does captures the reader’s attention right from the start, and then retains it. show less