DARKNESS, DARKNESS is the twelfth and last Charlie Resnick novel by John Harvey.

In 1984 (and into 1985), the Miners' Strike threatened to tear parts of the country apart. In mining communities neighbour was turned against neighbour, husband was turned against wife, father was turned against son – the enmities of that strike smoulder still in those areas and those communities. Charlie Resnick, recently promoted to Inspector, found himself running an information gathering unit in Mansfield at the heart of the dispute in Nottinghamshire where many miners wanted to work, and pickets from Yorkshire and elsewhere sought to stop them.

In 2014, the discovery of the body of a young woman who disappeared during the Strike in an almost abandoned mining village brings Resnick out of virtual retirement into a cold case unit, and back into the front line to assist in the investigation into her murder - forcing him to confront his past in what will assuredly be his last case.

The events of the previous book (COLD IN HAND) still haunt Resnick and whilst he is not broken he is certainly damaged almost beyond repair. This is the story of a man getting to grips with both the immediate past and the distant past, with both what he did and what he should have done, with how things have changed and how they have stayed the same. It is a powerful and very dark read – not dark in the gruesome sense but dark in the coming to terms with things sense, for both Charlie Resnick and his new boss/partner Catherine Njoroge who is a Detective Inspector in the East Midlands Serious Organised Crime Unit. I think it is an excellent read and already a strong candidate for my book of the year.

Mark Bailey, Northern Ireland
May 2014