Books in the Resnick series in order

A savage assault with a scalpel leaves Dr Tim Fletcher's body badly slashed in a deserted walkway - the first victim in a series of brutal assaults on hospital staff. As panic grips the city, it's up to Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick to find the killer. Faced with a mass of clues that lead nowhere and a past he cannot forget.

Little Gloria Summers' body has been found, hidden inside two plastic bin bags in a disused warehouse. Then Emily Morrison vanishes on a sunny Sunday afternoon. But years of patient police work have taught him a thing or two - including his conviction that those who jump to easy conclusions are often the last ones to solve a crime.

A series of brutal robberies takes Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick back ten years. To a time when a rash of similar incidents left him face to face with a frenzied sociopath who brought his life to a premature end - and to a time when his wife ran off with her lover, and leaving him with a psychic wound that still hasn't healed.

Nothing unusual there, then, just a pretty normal Christmas holiday for DI Resnick and his team. Pretty soon the police have proof that Nancy was kidnapped, and then - as the New Year celebrations wind down - the first tape arrives, and Resnick knows they're dealing with a dangerous psychopath.

But when the senior investigating officer is then found brutally murdered, DI Charlie Resnick is put on the case, and uncovers some sinister and startling revelations. It also brings Resnick into contact with Hannah Campbell, with whom he finds himself falling unexpectedly and awkwardly in love.

The battered body of a young woman is found floating in the still water of an inner-city canal. Police suspect a serial killer, which makes it a case for the newly formed Serious Crime Squad. Not DI Charlie Resnick's case, then; not his worry. But soon another body is found, and this time Charlie has a personal interest.

Lorraine Preston's brother, Michael, was sent down for life for the murder of their father - and now he's being allowed out for their mother's funeral. With his previously stable relationship with Hannah Campbell wavering, Resnick is forced back on his self-belief, his understanding of people.

Thirty years ago, the Miners' Strike threatened to tear the country apart, turning neighbour against neighbour, husband against wife, father against son - enmities which smoulder still. Resnick, recently made up to inspector, and ambivalent at best about some of the police tactics, had run an information gathering unit at the heart of the dispute.

With his highly-praised sequence of novels featuring Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, John Harvey created not only an unforgettable character of great depth and complexity, but a realistic and richly-peopled inner-city world of struggling heroes and feckless villains.

But when the dead girl's father seeks to lay the blame on DI Lynn Kellogg, Resnick's colleague and lover, the line between personal and professional becomes dangerously blurred.