Cold Light: (Resnick 6) - Softcover

Harvey, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099585723 ISBN 13: 9780099585725

Publisher: Arrow, 2013

Synopsis

'Forty-eight hours, that's what they reckon, isn't it? Forty-eight hours. If you don't find them in that, likely they're sodding dead...'

A cabbie's just been beaten up, there's a drunk-and-disorderly in the interview room and a possible child abuser on the way in. Nothing unusual there, then, just a pretty normal Christmas holiday for DI Resnick and his team.

Normal, that is, until Dana Matthieson calls to report her flatmate, Nancy, missing.

Dana's had a pretty grim Christmas herself: she's been sexually harassed by her boss, and may even have lost her job as well as her friend. Pretty soon the police have proof that Nancy was kidnapped, and then - as the New Year celebrations wind down - the first tape arrives, and Resnick knows they're dealing with a dangerous psychopath.

About this title

About the Author:

John Harvey is a novelist and critic. He has taught for the University of Cambridge English Faculty since 1974 and in 2000 became University Reader in Literature and Visual Culture. He is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

From Booklist:

Reviewers are running out of superlatives to describe Harvey's Charlie Resnick novels, and Harvey isn't helping us at all by turning out one book a year, each as good as or better than its predecessors. This sixth in the series finds Resnick and his fellow coppers in the industrial English city of Nottingham harried as usual, what with the customary run of Christmastime crimes. Matters take a decided turn for the worse, though, when a Social Services caseworker goes missing; messages from the kidnapper follow, indicating similarity to a previous case and suggesting that the perpetrator is very sick indeed. What separates a Resnick novel from other procedurals isn't the facts of the cases at hand; it's the nuanced portrait of how these cases affect the individual lives of police, criminals, and victims alike. As readers, we find ourselves both overwhelmed at the omnipresence of pain in Resnick's world and moved by the ways people deal with it: the reliance on irony; the savoring of small pleasures, whether it's a well-made sandwich or a nicely constructed tenor sax solo; and, most of all, the shared pleasure of hard work done well. This is no sentimentalized view, however; pain cripples, both emotionally and physically, and Resnick feels more than his share. It's time to stop calling Harvey one of our best crime writers and acknowledge that he is one of our best fiction writers, period. No one since Dickens has written about the British working class with greater insight or feeling. Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0099585723
• ISBN 13: 9780099585725
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384