Darkness and Light

Darkness and Light

(Frank Elder)

Summary

The third DI Frank Elder novel, from the master of British crime writing.

A phone call intrudes on retired Detective Inspector Frank Elder’s solitary life in Cornwall. It’s his estranged wife and she needs a favour. A friend’s sister, Claire Meecham, an unassuming widow in her fifties, has gone missing.

Elder agrees to return to Nottingham to try and track her down. Then Claire is found, dead. The killer has arranged her body meticulously, almost lovingly, forcing Elder to remember another dead woman, arranged in an almost identical way. It was his first case with the Serious Crimes Unit. His first case and never solved.

It’s clear to Elder that this is the work of the same unbalanced individual and, to find the killer, Elder must shine a light into the darkest recesses of human behaviour, the dark and twisted recesses of a disturbed human mind.

Reviews

  • A really seductive trip into the concealed hinterlands of sexuality
    Christopher Brookmyre

About the author

John Harvey

John Harvey was born in London, where he now lives, while considering Nottingham his spiritual home. Initially a teacher of English & Drama, he has been a full-time writer for more than forty years. The first of his 12 volume Charlie Resnick series, Lonely Hearts was selected by The Times as one of the '100 Best Crime Novels of the Century' and the first Frank Elder novel, Flesh & Blood, won the CWA Silver Dagger in 2004. He was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in the crime genre in 2007, and his story, 'Fedora' won the CWA Short Story Dagger in 2014.

In addition to writing fiction, he has written and published poetry, running Slow Dancer Press for over twenty years; his New & Selected Poems, Out of Silence was published in 2014. He has adapted the work of Arnold Bennett, A. S. Byatt, Graham Greene and others for radio and television, and in 2017, his dramatisation of the final Resnick novel, Darkness, Darkness, was produced at Nottingham Playhouse. He has been awarded honorary doctorates by the universities of Hertfordshire and Nottingham.
Learn More

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more