Charlie Resnick

Series · 12

books · 1989-2014

By John Harvey

Books in series

Lonely Hearts

1989

Shirley Peters is dead. Murdered. Her body is found twelve hours later in her own home. Just one of the many sordid domestic crimes hitting the city. Tony Macliesh, her rejected boyfriend, is the obvious prime suspect and he's just been picked off the Aberdeen train and put straight into custody. But then another women is sexually abused and throttled to death. And suddenly there appears to be one too many connections between these seemingly unrelated crimes. Because Detective Inspector Resnick is sure that the two murders are the work of one sadistic killer - two lonely hearts broken by one maniac. And it's up to Resnick to put the record straight - and put the bastard where he belongs.

Rough Treatment

1990

A series of house break-ins that are too neat to be anything but inside jobs; a missing kilo of coke; a thief with some very nasty habits and another with too tender a heart . . . all add up to John Harvey's second complex and fast-paced police procedural featuring Charlie Resnick.

Cutting Edge

1991

As the staff members of a large teaching hospital fall prey to a maniac with a surgeon's skill—a male nurse is castrated, a surgeon's hands are destroyed—Inspector Charlie Resnick must fight bureaucracy and time to find the perpetrator. Reprint.

Off Minor

1991

Little Gloria Summers' body has been found, hidden inside two plastic bin bags in a disused warehouse. Somewhere in the city, a child killer is on the loose, free to strike again. Then Emily Morrison vanishes on a sunny Sunday afternoon. A week later there are still no clues. Inspector Charlie Resnick is as appalled as the media. But years of patient police work have taught him a thing or two - including his conviction that those who jump to easy conclusions are often the last ones to solve a crime.

Wasted Years

1993

A series of brutal robberies takes Detective Inspector Resnick back ten years, to a time when a rash of similar incidents left him face to face with a frenzied sociopath and to a time when his wife ran off with her lover leaving Resnick with a psychic wound that still hasn’t healed. Now with the look-alike robberies escalating into violence and poignant memories that threaten to overwhelm him, Resnick must track down the men before they kill.

Cold Light

1995

A cabbie’s been beaten up, there’s a drunk and disorderly in the interview room and a possible child abuser is on his way in. Just a pretty normal Christmas Holiday for Resnick and his team. Then Dana Matheison calls to report her flat mate, Nancy, missing. 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.

Living Proof

1995

Charlie Resnick is assigned to protect mystery writer Cathy Jordan from a stalker, and he must catch the culprit at a convention of crime writers. By the author of Cold Light. Reprint.

Easy Meat

1996

Fifteen-year-old Nicky Snape, a long-time petty juvenile offender, is picked up for killing Eric Netherfield, only to turn up dead himself two days later where he is being held

Still Waters

1997

When the battered body of a young woman is discovered, the second corpse that is found, Charlie Resnick becomes involved in the case because his lover had been acquainted with the victim and her abusive husband and investigates the brutality that sometimes accompanies love. 15,000 first printing.

#10

Last Rites

1998

Lorraine Preston’s brother, Michael, was sent down for life for the murder of their father—and now he’s being allowed out for their mother’s funeral. A hardened criminal, Michael Preston is the last person Resnick wants back on the streets, especially now when Resnick is struggling to contain an explosive situation on the streets, where the spread of guns has led to a frightening escalation in drug-related crime. With his previously stable relationship with Hannah Campbell wavering, Resnick is forced back on his self-belief, and his understanding of people.

#11

Cold in Hand

2007

It's Valentine’s Day, and a dispute between rival gangs leaves a teenage girl dead. Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, nearing retirement, is hauled back to the front line to help deal with the fallout. But when the dead girl’s father seeks to lay the blame on Resnick’s partner, DI Lynn Kellogg, Resnick finds the line between the personal and the professional dangerously blurred. Meanwhile, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency starts to show a keen interest in one of Kellogg’s murder cases—a case the agency is convinced is linked to international gun running and people trafficking. Soon Kellogg is drawn into a web of deceit and betrayal that puts both her and Resnick in mortal danger. In Cold In Hand, John Harvey brings back "one of the most fully realized characters in modern crime fiction" (Sue Grafton) in another heart-stopping procedural.

#12

Darkness, Darkness

2014

Thirty years ago, the British Miners Strike threatened to tear england apart, turning neighbor against neighbor, husband against wife, father against son enmities which still smolder. Charlie Resnick, recently promoted to Detective Inspector and ambivalent, at best, about some of the police tactics used in the Strike, had run an surveillance-gathering unit at the heart of the dispute. Now, in virtual retirement, the discovery of the body of a young woman who disappeared during the Strike brings Resnick back to the front line to assist in the investigation into the woman s murder forcing him to confront his past in what will assuredly be his last case . . . as well as John s Harvey s final Charlie Resnick novel."

Author

John Harvey

Author · 28 books

aka Jon Barton, William S. Brady (with Angus Wells), L.J. Coburn (with Laurence James), J.B. Dancer (with Angus Wells), John B. Harvey, William M. James (with Terry Harknett and Laurence James), Terry Lennox, John J. McLaglen (with Laurence James), James Mann, Thom Ryder, J.D. Sandon (with Angus Wells), Jon Hart John Harvey (born 21 December 1938 in London) is a British author of crime fiction most famous for his series of jazz-influenced Charlie Resnick novels, based in the City of Nottingham. Harvey has also published over 90 books under various names, and has worked on scripts for TV and radio. He also ran Slow Dancer Press from 1977 to 1999 publishing poetry. The first Resnick novel, Lonely Hearts, was published in 1989, and was named by The Times as one of the 100 Greatest Crime Novels of the Century. Harvey brought the series to an end in 1998 with Last Rites, though Resnick has since made peripheral appearances in Harvey's new Frank Elder series. The protagonist Elder is a retired detective who now lives, as Harvey briefly did, in Cornwall. The first novel in this series, Flesh and Blood, won Harvey the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger in 2004, an accolade many crime fiction critics thought long overdue. In 2007 he was awarded the Diamond Dagger for a Lifetime's Contribution to the genre. On 14th July 2009 he received an honorary degree (Doctor of Letters) from the University of Nottingham in recognition of his literary eminence and his associations with both the University and Nottingham (particularly in the Charlie Resnick novels). He is also a big Notts County fan.