The Charlie Resnick Mysteries Series

A Christmas kidnapping puts British detective Charlie Resnick in the hot seat. “Cold Light is just about flawless” (The Washington Post Book World).   Working at the Nottingham public housing authority is miserable, but Nancy Phelan knows that the tenants she services are worse off than her. Consider Gary James, whose family Nancy recently assigned to a new council flat. He’s got two children, no work, and no heat. As Christmas approaches and his children shiver, he vents his rage at Nancy. After a two-hour wait, he smashes a chair to get her attention, then locks them both in her office. Police inspector Charlie Resnick breaks down the door before he has a chance to hurt her. But hours later, at the office Christmas party, Nancy disappears.  Although Gary James is the logical suspect, when the kidnapper starts sending the police department tapes, Resnick fears that the New Year may herald a psychopath.

The author of the Frank Elder Mystery, Body & Soul, delivers “a powerful, first-class police procedural” (Kirkus Reviews).   Raymond Cooke is looking for revenge, not corpses. It’s been six weeks since the gang of four young punks attacked him, since the one with the knife slit open his belly and left him to die on the street. After that Raymond bought a knife of his own, and has spent his nights lurking in Nottingham’s worst pubs, hoping for a chance at vengeance. Instead, walking home one night, he encounters a smell that reminds him of his work at the abattoir. It’s coming from the body of Gloria Summers. For over two months, police inspector Charlie Resnick has looked for the missing six-year-old. Now that she’s been found, Raymond Cooke becomes Resnick’s chief suspect. But to find the killer, the disheveled detective may have to look within the girl’s own family.

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.

The brooding British detective returns in this “moody revenge tragedy . . . Harvey creates characters of astonishing psychological diversity” (The New York Times Book Review).   Karen Archer understands that women who date doctors should expect tardiness. The last time she invited Tim Fletcher over, he arrived from the emergency room exhausted, and barely had time to say hello before he passed out on her bed. Tonight her patience has run out. After a bottle of wine and too much television, she gives up on Fletcher and leaves the house to find her own fun—but instead she finds Fletcher, covered in blood, sprawled across the steps near her building. Karen runs to find the police, not sure if Fletcher is alive or dead.  Despite his blood loss, Fletcher survives. Soon the attacker comes for other members of the hospital staff, and police inspector Charlie Resnick must race to find him before the slasher graduates from assault to murder.

A willing victim complicates a case for Detective Charlie Resnick, “one of the most fully realized characters in modern crime fiction” (Sue Grafton).   Maria Roy is in the tub, musing on her hatred for her movie producer husband, when Grabianski and Grice break into her house. Though she is fearful at first, something about Jerry Grabianski’s confidence calms her down. Over tall glasses of Scotch, she directs them to her valuables—jewelry, bonds, her wedding tape—even doing them the favor of unlocking her husband’s safe. There Grabianski finds a surprise: a kilo of cocaine. He leaves with the drugs, the valuables, and a piece of Maria’s heart.  This is not the story she tells to police inspector Charlie Resnick, but Maria’s confusion makes the disheveled detective doubt her account of the robbery. As he combs Nottingham for the burglars, Maria and Jerry’s love affair charges ahead. She is about to learn that not even love can keep crime from turning bloody.

A British police investigator looks into the murder of an abused woman: “More than a crime novel . . . a tapestry of intrigue and moral quandary” (San Francisco Chronicle).   For Charlie Resnick, the night they found the body in the water was the night that Milt Jackson came to town. Resnick is a jazz fiend and considers Jackson, a contemporary of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, one of the all-time greats. He has just sat down for the concert when the call comes in about the body. Gravely disappointed, the police inspector tears across town to run the crime scene. He finds the body of a young woman who shows signs of blunt force trauma and a recently terminated pregnancy. Attempts to identify the girl, and to link her to three other bodies recently found in canals, are futile. The case goes nowhere, but Resnick always remembers the night he missed Milt Jackson.  When another woman disappears, Resnick reopens the case, and finds that few places hold darker secrets than the black waters of the Nottingham canals.

A Northern England cop tries to track down an escaped convict: “One of the finest police procedural series around” (Publishers Weekly).   It has been thirteen years since Michael Preston killed his father, and now his mother is dead too. Halfway through his twenty-four year sentence, Michael is a docile prisoner whom the warden doesn’t mind letting out for an afternoon to pay his respects. Michael goes to the funeral under armed guard, and when the time comes to return to jail, he gives them the slip.  Police inspector Charlie Resnick’s city is under siege by drugs, gang warfare, and unhinged murderers. As blood flows in the streets of Nottingham, the rumpled detective attempts to hold his department together while his personal life comes unhinged. An escaped killer and an ever-rising crime wave are trouble enough, but Resnick has problems at home that may prove impossible to solve.

In the North of England, a cop hunts for a homicidal woman: “Smartly paced, slyly humorous, unsentimental about police work . . . one of his best” (Kirkus Reviews).   Although the cop who finds the man in Alfreton Road describes him as “absolutely stark bollock naked,” that is not quite true—he is wearing a sock. The naked man is flabby, middle-aged, and bleeding heavily, in no shape to be sprinting down the street at three in the morning. After the ER doctors patch up his stab wound, the man tells the police he was attacked by a prostitute. Then he clams up, embarrassed, and refuses to even give his name.  This is the fourth such recent attack reported to police inspector Charlie Resnick’s thinly stretched Nottingham police department. Two victims were salesmen; the other was a traveling Italian soccer fan, lured away from his friends by a redheaded beauty. It’s up to Resnick to find a link between the crimes, and to nab the perpetrator before more of the city’s men let their basest urges lead them into peril.

A detective’s dark past meets his violent present in “[a] rich tapestry that lifts the police procedural into the realm of the mainstream novel” (Sue Grafton).   It starts with five professional thieves. At their first robbery, they press a sawed-off shotgun against a bank manager’s head, and leave with nearly forty thousand pounds. They repeat the trick three times, raking in nearly half a million in cash. They have yet to kill, but with each raid they come closer to taking their bounty in blood.  The Nottingham police department charges the brilliant but troubled Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick with stopping the crime spree. When the robberies turn violent, he can no longer deny their similarity to a long-buried incident from ten years ago, when a confrontation with a sociopathic killer nearly cost him his life. To halt this chilling crime wave, he must reopen a case he has spent a decade trying to forget.

A teenage thug’s apparent suicide reveals a vicious cycle of violence: “No one does the British police procedural better” (Manchester Evening News).   Nicky Snape likes robbing old people. The fifteen-year-old snatches shirts from stores, purses from his teachers, and as much money as he can lift from his mother. But for an easy score he knows no better target than the elderly. When he sneaks into the home of Eric and Doris Netherfield, his footsteps wake the old couple. With a piece of steel railing he keeps by the bed for protection, Eric attempts to defend his home. He fails. Nicky fights back, battering them both to within an inch of their lives.  Nottingham police inspector Charlie Resnick knows Nicky Snape, and doesn’t hesitate to arrest him. But what should be the end of the crime is only the beginning, as Snape’s arrest sparks a chain reaction of rape, suicide, and murder.

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.