Body & Soul

It's a busy police procedural thriller that for me gets off to a slow start. The action starts at Part 2 when the police investigation of an artist's murder takes centre stage.

Frank Elder, a retired police detective, is momentarily a suspect in the murder of an avant garde painter who used Frank's daughter as a model for his paintings. The paintings are erotic ones and out of parental anger, Frank attacks the artist at an exhibition a few days before he is brutally murdered. Frank has an alibi for the time of the murder, and then suspicion falls on Katherine, his daughter, when police see a similar looking woman on CCTV footage near the murder scene.

The story is told in alternative chapters from Frank's point of view and that of the lead police investigator, DCI Hadley. Several leads are blended into the narrative and investigated until the killer is identified. A side story develops that involves a traumatic event from Katherine's past and this story closes the book on a sobering note.

DCI Hadley is an interesting character, a lesbian in a mostly male police force. There's a future for her in a sequel to this story, perhaps even a series.

John Harvey will be eighty later this year and has said that henceforth he will confine his literary output to short stories, and will not write any more novels. An understandable decision, perhaps, but it is a shame as this latest (last?) one shows that he is still at the top of his game.

Harvey is best known, of course, for the marvellous series of crime novels set in and around Nottingham and featuring the melancholic cat- and jazz-loving Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, brought to life on the small screen by Tom Wilkinson. He has, however, written a number of other novels, including a shorter series featuring Frank Elder who, after a long and uneventful career as a sergeant in London, had moved to Nottingham on promotion to Inspector, although the novels recount his exploits after taking early retirement and fleeing the job and a failed marriage and relocating in Cornwall.

Like Resnick, Elder is no stranger to melancholy and self-doubt, both characteristics being exacerbated by the events related in Ash and Bone, in which his daughter Katherine (Kate) is abducted and then raped. Kate also features at the heart of this new novel. Several years on from the awful incidents referred to above, she is now living in a flat share in London, living largely from hand to mouth and working as an artist’s model. The artist, who is on the cusp of establishing himself as one of the biggest names in his field, seems obsessed by Kate, and they drift into an uncomfortable relationship which gradually becomes unwholesome, if not exactly abusive. Having had enough, Kate ends the relationship but is ill suited to cope with the consequent emotional upheaval.

Having been all but estranged from Kate (through her choice rather than his), Frank welcomes the opportunity to come back into her life when she comes to visit him in Cornwall, although the reunion is short-lived. After the briefest of visits, she returns suddenly to London. Her emotional fragility is then further challenged when the artist is found brutally murdered in his studio, and she is, unavoidably, cast as one of the prime suspects. Franks comes back to offer whatever support he can, and seems to be making headway, bringing Kate back to a degree of emotional stability.

At this point, however, following a bizarre accident, the man who had abducted and abused her all those years ago escapes from prison.

Harvey brings all these threads together with great ease, making it all flow so much more coherently than my synopsis above. He is a past master at the police procedural, and knows how to convey sharp, plausible dialogue, and to develop tight, concise plots. This is certainly a strong note on which to bow out, although I hope he might let himself be persuaded to return to his keyboard again very soon.