Good Bait

October 15, 2012
The leads of this stand-alone from Harvey (A Darker Shade of Blue), London Det. Chief Insp. Karen Shields and Cornwall Det. Insp. Trevor Cordon, pursue cases in parallel without ever meeting, to intriguing but frustrating effect. A rash of killings beginning with young Moldovan immigrant Petru Andronic, found encased in an icy pond, occupy 30-something Karen, while Corton, nearing retirement age, tries to help prostitute Letitia Carlin. Driven by a confused mixture of fatherly protectiveness and lust, Trevor goes on the run with Letitia, her three-year-old son, Danny, in tow and her former lover, Ukrainian mob boss Anton Kosach, in pursuit. Karen’s investigation, meanwhile, points to a mounting turf fight between native-born gangsters and Eastern Europeans led by Anton. Harvey’s skill is evident in his atmospheric prose and sensitive look at how two very different cops deal with policing’s personal toll, but the meandering story line, which never manages to satisfactorily conclude, marks this as a lesser display for his talent. Agent: Sarah Lutyens, Lutyens & Rubinstein.

November 15, 2012
Forget what you had planned for today; the new Harvey comes first. What possible connection could the teen's body found on Hampstead Heath have with the woman's remains splattered over the Finsbury Park subway tracks? As DCI Karen Shields soon learns, the 17-year-old, a native of the Republic of Moldova, had been romancing a girl whose father, a career criminal, disapproved. DI Trevor Cordon, plodding along down in Cornwall, finds himself personally involved in the tube tragedy when it turns out that the dead woman had asked his help in locating her vanished daughter and, when he demurred, went up to London to find her herself. With an assist from private eye Jack Kiley, Cordon locates the missing Letitia and her son and resolves to protect them from a cadre of Ukrainian brothers, the worst of them, Anton Kosach, involved with drugs, prostitution, slave trafficking, gunrunning and more--a laundry list of felonies clearly familiar to whoever killed the Hampstead Heath victim. Shields, a black woman constantly confronting sexism and racism in the force, and Cordon, a divorced loner yearning for a relationship with Letitia, never actually meet, but their cases collide in the halls of power where heavyweights from the Metropolitan Police, the Serious Organized Crime Agency and the Secret Intelligence Service are planning to take down a consortium of Eastern Europeans brutalizing Great Britain. Justice triumphs, but for Harvey, this hardly constitutes a happy ending for all. The remarkable output of Harvey, whose 100-plus titles (Far Cry, 2010, etc.) have earned him the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger Award, represents the best of British crime writing.

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October 15, 2012

Harvey's (Far Cry; "Charlie Resnick" series) latest novel begins with the murder of a Moldovan teenager on London's Hampstead Heath and unfolds to include a crime ring stretching across southern England and onto the Continent. DCI Karen Shields knows that she is in trouble when her overburdened Homicide & Serious Crime Unit, which is investigating the killing, is also left to investigate a possible turf war involving elements of organized crime. Meanwhile DI Trevor Cordon in Cornwall is pulled into a personal matter involving a local woman killed in the London subway. As he searches for her daughter, he comes very close to also being drawn into DCI Shields's case. VERDICT Harvey's talent for character development results in multidimensional protagonists and supporting players whom readers will both love and hate, and his skill at writing tight plotlines results in a gritty, hard-to-put-down crime novel. A definite must-read for fans of British crime fiction.--Lisa Hanson O'Hara, Univ. of Manitoba Libs., Winnipeg, Canada

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2013
Since wrapping up his acclaimed Charlie Resnick series, Harvey has introduced several new copperssome patrolling Resnick's Nottingham turf; others in London and Cornwalland the newbies have all displayed the complexity, vulnerability, and multifaceted appeal that fans have come to expect from a Harvey creation. That is especially true here, in a two-pronged crime tale featuring DCI Karen Shields (a bit player in earlier Harvey novels), of the London Homicide & Serious Crimes Unit, and soon-to-retire DI Trevor Cordon, from Cornwall. Shields is investigating the apparently drug-connected murder of a Moldovan teen, while Cordon is tracking a disappeared young woman with whom he has a past. Naturally, the two cases are related, and while Harvey expertly constructs the connective tissue, we find ourselves much more involved in Shields' story; both plots are fully fleshed and engaging, but Shields steals the show, emerging as a starworthy creation. Harvey has always done very well with supporting female characters (Lynn Kellogg in the Resnick novels), but now he has a series lead on his hands crying out for more screen time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)