Nicky Snape is a 15 year old tearaway who will steal anything from anyone. He steals his mother's money and his teacher's purse and later on breaks into a house to steal more. When the elderly owner tries to beat him off with an iron rod, Nicky takes it an beats him with it. When the old man's...
This is John Harvey and Resnick at their best!As usual the action takes place in Nottingham (and I particularly enjoyed the occasional references to Loughborough!), and the beleaguered Resnick is up against it once again. A local festival is celebrating crime fiction and some classic noir films,...
well, in my opinion, the story was quite simple and could have been deliciously told - instead, what we have is a roundabout way of telling one underlying story, that is at the same time overlapping with multiple other threads, most of which don't add to the main plot. Sure, this could be charact...
John Harvey's books featuring Charlie Resnick and his crew continue to get better and better. I find it interesting through nine novels featuring these characters how Harvey leaves some threads unfinished and sometimes strangely not mentioned as often as one would think. One favorable aspect of...
It's a lot darker than Rough Treatment. The streets of Nottingham are gritty, full of disaffected, frequently violent youth, but that's just the backdrop. The police work involves tracking down the person or persons who are carving up the staff of a local hospital, and a handsome but sociopathic ...
It seems ridiculous to hem in some great writers as only "genre" writers, because they're just so damned good at what they do, but at his heart that is what Harvey is: a crime writer. But what a crime writer! If you want to get a feel for what it was like in England in the 1960s, 1980s (check out...
Sometimes you can jump into a series at someplace other than the beginning and feel right at home. That was my experience with Ash and Bone. Harvey is skilled enough to fill in background information unobtrusively and at the point when the reader needs it (as opposed to dropping a clunky recap of...
FLESH AND BLOOD (Amateur Sleuth – Non-cozy) – VGJohn Harvey – StandaloneRetired Detective Inspector Elder is haunted by the unsolved disappearance of sixteen-year-old in 1988. One of the prime suspects, Shane Donald, has been released from prison, and Elder feels compelled to revisit the scene of...
Charlie Resnick's last case, Last Rites is another story about modern-day cops and killers. The underlying theme, however, is about love and Charlie finally finds it with his partner Lynn Kellog. The setting is Nottingham, England that is being torn apart by violent gang warfare, corruption in th...
This is number four of the Charlie Resnick series. This series grows on a reader and for those that enjoy books with stories with a large amount of back story and development, then this series is for that type of reader. Also, readers that enjoy this author and Charlie Resnick would most likely...
Most book series require the reader to start at the beginning because of development of characterization. But with John Harvey's engaging 6th Charlie Resnick novel, "Cold Light," those rules do not apply.A few minor adjustments to Charlie Resnick have already transpired in previous novels, but to...
“Got to be more to life than sex and violence, hasn’t there?”Lonely Hearts, from British author John Harvey, is the first novel in the long-running Charlie Resnick series. With interesting characters, the book is a good beginning, and the emphasis is on a handful of Nottingham based police detec...
There were defence wounds on both the upper and lower arms, as well as a number of small cuts to the hands, which suggested that she had struggled with her killer for the knife. There were also a significant number of other signs of trauma to the body, bruises and contusions, mostly on the arms a...
Michael, she’d said, anywhere else, okay? Anywhere but there. Michael Sherwood not his real name, not even close. But in the end she’d caved in, just as he’d known she would. Thirty-three by not so many months and going nowhere; thirty-three, though she was still only owning up to twenty-nine. Wh...
It could have been the change in the weather. Or it could have been something more than that. I looked up at the windows. Although it was still the middle of the day, the curtains were mostly pulled to. As though whoever was inside wanted to cut out the rest of the world altogether. To hide from ...
It fell in long, slanting lines, faint at first, then thickening. It gathered in corners and against the sides of buildings, funnelling between the broken brick and tile and rusted car parts that littered the back yards and paltry gardens. Covering everything. The sky a low, leaden grey, unrelent...
Letitia was the more listless, the more likely to lapse into moods of depression, alleviated by her son’s almost omnipresent good humour. Kiley had made contact with Anton’s brother, Taras, as requested; driven up from London and met him at an Ibis hotel, off the M6 north of Preston. Phoned Cordo...
She had on a plain black skirt and she was sitting beside me changing the plaster on my cheekbone. Her hands were small and cool and I liked the feel of them on my face. Still I flinched when the plaster came away from the bruised skin and she tutted at my babyishness. She...
The news about Helen was good: if things continued to progress as expected, she could be discharged within days. The theology student, however, having rallied, had slipped backward during the night and was now unconscious and breathing with the help of a respirator, his condition giving grave cau...
Weeks. The government had had enough. Time for a showdown. Stop the miners, the striking miners, in their tracks. Break the strike once and for all. Show them who was boss. Tales winding back on the grapevine from London of meetings between government officials, the Home Office and British Coal. ...
As soon as they were inside the flat, Nick went to his room and closed the door. Dawn didn’t know what to do. She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t think Nick would want to speak to her. And if he did, she was half afraid of what he’d say. Answe...