A serial killer stalks the women of Nottingham in the first Charlie Resnick Mystery—“A quantum leap for the police procedural” (Andrew Vachss, author of the Burke series).
Shirley Peters was murdered in her own home. A directionless young woman with a fondness for cheap red wine and a restraining order against her ex-boyfriend, her death is just another in the files of the Nottingham detective’s bureau. The police round up her ex-lover without much fuss, and are preparing to try him when another body surfaces. The method, the target, and the extreme violence are all a match for the killing of Shirley Peters. Nottingham is facing a serial killer. Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick is the first to see the connection. Both victims placed ads in a citywide Lonely Hearts column, and the rumpled detective suspects that their killer found them by preying on their isolation. He has little time to find the killer before more women die and Nottingham erupts into panic.
John Harvey (b. 1938) is an incredibly prolific British mystery writer. The author of more than one hundred books, as well as poetry and scripts for television and radio, Harvey did not begin writing professionally until 1975. Until then he was a teacher, educated at Goldsmiths College, London, who taught literature, drama, and film at colleges across England. After cutting his teeth on paperback fiction, Harvey debuted his most famous character, Charlie Resnick, in 1989’s Lonely Hearts, which the English Times called one of the finest crime novels of the century. A police inspector noted for his love of both sandwiches and jazz, Resnick has starred in eleven novels and one volume of short stories. The BBC has adapted two of the Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment (1990), for television movies. Both starred Academy Award–nominated actor Tom Wilkinson and had screenplays written by Harvey. Besides writing fiction, Harvey spent over twenty years as the head of Slow Dancer Press. He continues to live and write in London.