Cold in Hand

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.

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

The police procedural is a genre that, like the sonnet or the haiku, follows certain rules. You have the cop, the crime and the pursuit. You can be pretty sure that the cop will be skillful enough to ask the questions that will unveil the guilty party, that he will have a bit of romance in his off-hours and that he will be a stubbornly honest fellow who has frequent conflicts with inept or corrupt superiors. Ed McBain was one of the 20th-century masters of the form, just as Harvey is today, along with Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin, whose rumpled, stubborn, romantically challenged Harry Bosch and John Rebus were surely influenced by Resnick. It's a form with limitations: predictability, for one thing. It's hard, within the form's boundaries, to rise to the level of more expansive stories like Dennis Lehane's Mystic River or Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know. But the procedural endures because cops-and-robbers tales are as basic to our popular culture as Westerns once were, and Harvey, who turns 70 this year, writes them as well as anyone alive. If you enjoy police procedurals, this sad, powerful novel will surely give you pleasure.