Rough Treatment

John Harvey is an award-winning writer who lives north of London. He received the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger award for sustained excellence in the field of writing for his ten published mysteries in 2007. Giving us the underbelly of Hollywood in Pulp Fiction fashion, Harvey's tale intersects the lives of a broken down TV director, Harold Roy and his unhappy wife and two small-time crooks who have created a sure-fire deal to rob wealthy mansions. Grice and Grabianski are polar opposite thieves with a common purpose. They break into Harold and Maria Roy's mansion dressed up like insurance salesmen. The shocked Maria offers them a drink, and then finds that she is sexually attracted to Jerzy Grabianski. They helped themselves to artwork; furs; and the contents of the safe, which includes a kilo of cocaine waiting to redistribution. Detective Inspector Resnick is immediately suspicious of Maria Roy's story of the two intruders, and the hunt is on. Harold Roy is absolutely no help, as his universe is crashing in on him both at home and at work: "Harold Roy clenched his fists and stared at his knuckles until they were quite white. If ever there'd been any chance of salvaging his future with this particular company, the last half-hour had blown it. Once the rumors made their rounds, the usual vindictiveness, more than usual exaggeration - couldn't finish the series, couldn't keep to schedule, boozed up on the set, taking swings at the producer - he'd be lucky to get a job directing sixty-second promos for satellite TV." Harvey's character-driven plot twists and turns and sucks in the reader from almost the first page. There is real drama here, and every character is feeling it in his or her own way. Yet all are tied together with just one burglary that keeps expanding like lava from a volcano. Harvey is a master at setting the mood and getting the dialogue just right. The reader feels like they are in the room with whatever action is taking place. He is a puppeteer with tone, and his imperfect and totally human characters skitter on his stick as they make one bad decision after another. ROUGH TREATMENT is just that...no one escapes from John Harvey's expertise as a writer; make it an entertaining and no doubt popular read with his fans. Shelley Glodowski Senior Reviewer

Every bit as tightly woven as any in this marvelous series; it is more of a character study than the others. Master thief Jerry Grabianski is as finely wrought as his protagonist, DI Charlie Resnick. Less blood, more subtlety.