Cold Light - Hardcover

Harvey, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805020462 ISBN 13: 9780805020465

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1994

Synopsis

Dana Matthieson reports her roommate missing on Christmas Day, but several days pass before the police have chilling proof that Nancy Phelan was abducted, and it is the New Year before Charlie Resnick knows he is dealing with a sicko. 12,500 first printing. Mystery Guild Main. Tour.

About this title

Reviews

Harvey's sixth industrial-strength procedural featuring Nottingham copper Charlie Resnick is built of small, delicate images: a young mother warms her hands before touching her sleeping baby in a stone-cold council house; Resnick, foraging in his fridge for the makings of a sandwich, wistfully glances at the face of Billie Holliday on the front of a boxed set of CDs he has just bought himself for Christmas, though he has yet to purchase a CD player. When Nancy Phelan, a social worker, goes missing after a holiday dance, the divorced Resnick meets Dana, her flatmate, and escapes his self-imposed isolation for a brief passionate moment. Nancy's most recent lover is a likely suspect, but the case against him falters and Resnick falls into depression. A number of city cab drivers are robbed and beaten; the cops are looking for someone with a dragon tattoo and very fair hair. The elderly father of a woman cop falls ill; a killer strikes and then takes another victim ; Resnick lets the affair with Dana self-destruct through fear and forgetfulness. Harvey, a poet in thin disguise, constructs his plot masterfully, meting out surprises in subplots that reach their conclusions with sudden, unsynchronous credibility.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Sixth in the author's superb series of police procedurals featuring complex Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick and his colleagues in a Northern English city (Off-Minor, 1992, etc.). Dana Matthieson, librarian in a firm of architects, has invited roommate Nancy Phelan, a social worker, to a company Christmas dance at a local hotel. Nancy, seen late in the evening getting into a car, has now vanished. The two major suspects are hot-tempered Gary James, jobless father of two, who threatened Nancy, his caseworker, in her Welfare Dept. office; and Robin Hidden, a neurotic suitor who loved her passionately and was turned down flat. As backgrounds and alibis are painstakingly sifted, we observe Nancy's anguished parents; the grubby, violence-infused life of Gary and his sweet non-wife Michelle; and Dana's short-lived involvement with DI Charlie. The case nears a dead end, but when yet another victim turns up missing Charlie and his team make all the right moves to a tensely emotional windup. A suspenseful, unfailingly engrossing procedural enhanced by its clipped, faintly sardonic style--the best yet in Harvey's unbroken string of winners. (Mystery Guild main selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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

The sixth Charlie Resnick police procedural presents Charlie with a frightening challenge: a psychopath has abducted a young woman. Another British winner.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805020462
• ISBN 13: 9780805020465
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 370