Living Proof - Softcover

John Harvey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099585731 ISBN 13: 9780099585732

Publisher: Arrow, 2013

Synopsis

When a man is found in the middle of Alfreton Road in the early hours one Sunday morning, stark naked and bleeding heavily from a chest wound, he is the latest in a series of viscous attacks on men. Enquiries in the mean-streets of Nottingham's red-light district have brought the investigations to a dead end. Charlie Resnick is the man for the job. And as if he hasn't had enough to deal with, he now has to provide police protection for a celebrity at the annual crime convention - an author with some very unpleasant 'fan' mail. Chronically short-staffed as he is, it's a guessing game as to when Resnick's lack of manpower will have fatal consequences.

About this title

About the Author:

John Harvey is the author of the richly praised Charlie Resnick novels, the first of which, Lonely Hearts, was named by The Times as one of the '100 Best Crime Novels of the Century'. His first novel featuring Frank Elder, Flesh and Blood, won the CWA Silver Dagger in 2004, and a Barry Award for the Best British Crime Novel published in the US in 2004. In 2007 John Harvey was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger and in 2009 he was awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Letters, by the University of Nottingham. To find out more about John Harvey visit his website at: www.mellotone.co.uk

From Booklist:

Perhaps what's so jarring about this latest Charlie Resnick novel is the way artifice intrudes on reality. The Resnick series has always been distinguished by the unrelenting dailiness of its vision of cops and criminals; we see the squalor, the pathos, the loneliness, even occasionally the tenderness that constitute their lives, but we see these qualities in ordinary ways, mundane detail building upon mundane detail until the gray reality of it all overwhelms us. That happens here, too, as always, but the main subject--potential murder at a crime writers' convention--seems so, well . . . writerly that we recoil in surprise, as if we'd been served a dainty bite of caviar in a joint renowned for its fish and chips. Resnick, who doesn't read mysteries, recoils, too, much more comfortable with the other case on his plate--finding a missing whore with a penchant for stabbing her johns--but he's forced to tag along at the writers' convention, making friends in spite of himself with the Sue Grafton^-like author whose life has been threatened. Just as Resnick gradually overcomes his prejudices against crime writers, so we gradually overcome our own prejudices against crime novels about crime writers. Even writers and conventiongoers, we realize, have their own gray reality, their own loneliness to confront, and Harvey does the confronting with his signature series of glancing blows, bruising in their cumulative effect. "What happens, most of the time anyway, whatever it is someone's done, somehow you come to understand." Resnick is right again, even when the something someone has done is write about writers. Bill Ott

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0099585731
• ISBN 13: 9780099585732
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288