In a True Light: A Novel of Crime (Otto Penzler Books) - Hardcover

John Harvey is the author of the richly-praised sequence of ten Charlie Resnick novels, the first of which, Lonely Hearts, was named by The Times as one of the ‘100 Best Crime Novels of the Century.’ In 2004, William Heinemann published Flesh and Blood, the first novel featuring retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder. He is also a poet, dramatist and occasional broadcaster.

*Starred Review* We've had to wait far too long for a new novel from John Harvey, whose Charlie Resnick series, concluded in 1999 after 10 installments, helped redefine the British procedural. And now we have something completely different. Sloane is a 60-year-old London painter, not a blue-collar copper from the Midlands, but he is also an ex-con, recently released from prison after serving time for art forgery. Summoned to the deathbed of a former lover--a far more successful painter Sloane met in New York during the bohemian fifties--he learns to his amazement that he has a grown daughter. Carrying out his dying lover's wishes, Sloane ventures to New York to establish contact with this phantom from the past. The daughter, Connie, is a struggling jazz singer whose life and career are jeopardized by a self-destructive, abusive relationship with her manager, a mobster with illusions of grandeur. Harvey jumps between Sloane in the present, forced to reengage with life in order to help his daughter, and Sloane in the past, a young painter in the Village, falling in love with Connie's mother, hearing Monk at the Five Spot, letting the full force of bohemian culture at its zenith wash over him. This is not one of those overly intellectualized art mysteries in which Renaissance paintings contain elaborate puzzles; rather, it is a streetwise, savvy thriller that uses the energy of modern art, not its peripheral pretensions, to tell a complex story of emotional rebirth. A surprising and immensely satisfying return to crime fiction for one of the genre's true modern masters. Bill Ott
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