If you are already a fan of John Harvey’s police procedurals featuring the Nottingham detective inspector Charlie Resnick you will find no disappointment in store in this, the eleventh Resnick novel (and an unanticipated addition to a series which its creator had announced would stop with the tenth, Last Rites, published a decade ago). If you are new to the series then clearly you would not be wise to start with this one: the very first, Lonely Hearts, is where to begin. That is not to say this is not a book worth reading on its own merits, but it cannot be fully appreciated by anyone who does not have a previous acquaintance with Resnick and his Nottingham setting.

The plot of Cold in Hand, as with Harvey’s previous Resnick novels, is excellent, and I am not going to give any of it away here. What is perhaps most interesting about this book and sets it apart from its predecessors (even as it shares their merits) is its distinctive atmosphere. This is an older Resnick, on the edge of retirement, a man whose experiences of the seamy side of life have left him with many reasons to be tired, cynical, embittered, yet he has achieved a measure of emotional fulfilment and personal happiness. In the course of this dark novel his new-found contentment and security is brutally torn from him, yet he has the strength to endure and he remains the rough-edged fictional police detective that perhaps most of us would choose to come up against in real life, with his integrity, his honesty, his resilience and his competence. He is also thoroughly likeable, even in the faults and petty failings that contribute to making him a believable character.

The Britain of Cold in Hand is grim, violent, gracelessly ugly, and relentlessly authentic. There is nothing gratuitous in Harvey’s depictions of violence, and nothing tokenistic in his engagement with issues of racism, violent crime, sex trafficking and police-community tensions. Everything is rooted in a very recognizable reality.

Harvey’s style is as fine as ever — taut and spare, never a word too many or too few, seething with a low-key energy that suddenly bursts finds sharp focus in a piece of imagery such as ‘eyes that brought butterscotch disconcertingly to mind’, a laugh that ‘splintered into a brittle cough’. The detail of the relationship between Resnick and Lynn Gregory, and of their home with its good food, its untidiness, its cats, its birdfeeders and its little comforts, is convincingly depicted. The warmth of their relationship leaves the reader little prepared for the bitter, raw grief that is to come.

A powerful, utterly involving novel — but read the others in the series first.

© 2009 Ralph Harrington

Ralph Harrington, Ph.D. is a historian who has researched, lectured and published on medical history and the history of trauma, among other topics. His web site is at http://www.greycat.org

Keywords: fiction, murder