Lonely Hearts

First Line: She hadn't thought of him for a long time. Ever since I started focusing on mysteries, I would see people praise John Harvey's Charlie Resnick series. Although I didn't do anything about it for a few years, I did file that praise away in one of my mental lumber rooms, and now I've read the first in the series to see if the praise was deserved. Even though it's only the first in the series, I think Lonely Hearts has set the stage for many hours of reading pleasure to come. Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick is a bit battered and world weary. Divorced and overweight, a middle-aged lover of food, cats, and jazz, he takes all of his cases to heart, feeling compassion for the victims and rage for the perpetrators. One of his cases (involving child abuse) has gone to the courts, and Resnick finds himself with two murder victims. After investigating both, it turns out that their only tie is that both women had placed an ad in a local "Lonely Hearts" column. Will Resnick find the killer before any more women are found dead in Nottingham? Although Lonely Hearts was written twenty years ago, it didn't feel dated, other than having more references to smoking and a lack of cell phones. Resnick is shown as not only having great compassion toward people but also great rage, as when he interviews a suspect he believes to be guilty. (Anyone watching me read this scene would tell you that I resemble the proverbial deer in the headlights. Whoa!) Having come fresh from reading Dog On It, it was nice to see that Resnick's cats (Dizzy, Miles, Pepper and Bud) didn't have a single thought to share with anyone. Their lives consisted of eating, twining around human feet and sleeping-- usually on top of Resnick's head or curled around his neck. The characterizations in the book were very strong, and the identity of the killer I found particularly baffling. The only quibble I have with this book is that, once the possible killer is mentioned, the action begins to snowball, gaining more and more speed until the end, which felt very rushed. But that's a small complaint. With the cast of characters Harvey introduced me to in Lonely Hearts, I'm looking forward to making my way through this series and savoring each book.

Lonely Hearts (1989) introduces Charlie Resnick, a divorced, untidy, middle-aged police detective in Nottingham, England. Resnick is a protagonist we want to spend time with--compassionate and intuitive, he loves food, American jazz, his cats, and his job. The murder of first one and then a second lonely woman leads Resnick to a killer who stalks his victims through the Lonely Hearts column. The compelling supporting cast of cops, criminals, and social workers gives this complex police procedural depth and heart. http://www.stopyourekillingme.com/H_Authors/Harvey_John.html

Ordinarily, I'm not much of a mystery fan, but I found the Resnick series to be quite a departure from what I had expected. These novels are actually in the police procedural genre (the McBain books, for instance, are its American equivalent) and center on a group of investigators in the English city of Nottingham. There are ten books in all, with the concluding volume in the series being the 1999 release, "Last Rites".The central figure is Charlie Resnick, a middle-aged man of Polish descent, overweight, divorced, the guardian of four cats, a jazz lover, unlucky in love. In many ways, he's a stolid, workaday figure, not especially gifted with brilliance or exceptional deductive reasoning. But that's one of the points of this series: the characters are very human. Some succeed (justly or otherwise); some fail. Friends will come and go; love affairs will start and awkwardly end. People die. Those who seem sympathetic when viewed from one angle are shown to be all too frail when seen from another.Resnick's squad isn't burning with zeal to pursue justice or punish crime. They're just doing a job. They're not angels, and indeed, some of them are rather despicable. Those that do try to aspire to something better receive no special reward; they're as likely to be caught in the random unfairness of life as any other.And the villains are not criminal masterminds or psychopathic serial killers. For the most part, they're small-minded and lazy people, or those looking for the main chance, or just plain screw-ups. None of them are Moriartys or Hannibal Lecters. Nonetheless, some of them prove to be chilling all the same; they're your neighbors, your friends, people who have lost their way and become trapped in a cycle of violence. But they have the same fears and desires as anyone else.The novels are not especially plot-driven. They're rather character studies, small arcs showing the lives and thoughts and fates of Resnick and his associates. And equal attention is paid to those on the other side of the law, or to the victims, or even to those on the periphery. The stories are built up out of small moments, minor interludes, quiet scenes. The jazz that Resnick loves so well informs the series; there is rarely a large, grandiose thundering climax, or a pulsing, driven beat; rather, there are starts and stops, variations on a theme, improvisations, minor notes.Some characters in the series will grow wiser. Some won't. One will be killed in a sudden brawl totally peripheral to the main plot, and his killer will much later suffer a similar fate. Criminals will escape the scene of the crime only to be killed in car crashes. Miserable fates will continue to be doled out to the same families over and over again, yet they seem powerless to escape.In many ways, it seems Resnick is fighting a losing battle, putting away a few minor league criminals while the city deteriorates around him and evil flourishes. Yet if one thread runs

People who don't like police procedurals shouldn't be allowed to write reviews of them -- although anyone can tell by the "yuck" comment that the so-called reviewer is no intellectual.This book is the first in the Charlie Resnick series, which has me totally hooked. He's an overweight, sort of sad and lonely guy who loves cats and jazz. How could you not love him? His characters are so true, the plots gritty, and there isn't always a nice big bow to tie up all the loose ends; this is also true in life.

Excellent debut of the gritty procedural Charlie Resnick series, set in an unnamed city (Nottingham) in the British Midlands. From the beginning it's clear why this series has become so popular over time. Harvey brings all the banal nastiness of routine policework to the book, much as the television shows Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue did on the small screen. Also like those series, he arranges a deep cast of characters around a less than striking hero, paunchy, ill-dressed, Inspector Charlie Resnick (he being of Polish descent). The plot covers the plodding efforts of the force to solve first one murder, then a second, the linking of the two, and in a somewhat cliché climax, the race to avert the killing of Charlie's new love interest. What makes the book stand out is the convincing cast of policemen, witnesses, suspects, and assorted other folks Harvey brings to life.