You Snooze, You Lose

I remember being crushed ten years ago (1998) when John Harvey announced that Last Rights would be his final Charlie Resnick novel. Neatly enough, Last Rights was the tenth novel in the Resnick series, a detective series that I followed almost from the beginning.

I looked forward to the next Resnick almost as soon as I closed the final page on the last one, even having British friends hand-carry the new ones to me when I lived in Algiers or found myself stuck deep in the Sahara Desert for weeks at a time. By 1998 I was living in London and was able to grab the British version of Last Rights on the first day that it hit my local Waterstones. Even before I finished that one, I managed to get an email to Mr. Harvey pleading with him not to kill off the series and had a very polite response from him thanking me for my enthusiasm and explaining why he felt it was time for him to move on.

What's a reader to do? I grudgingly accept the man's right to call his own shots and, during the last ten years, I've reread the whole series in the order in which it was written. Quite a treat, that was.

But now, now I get news that there is a new Charlie Resnick novel out in the world titled Cold in Hand, a book that was published in the U.S. on September 15 while I was apparently asleep. How could I have missed this one for the last two months? Even worse, I find that it was published in the U.K. way back on January 31...how humiliating is that oversight for someone who considers himself to be a Resnick fanatic?

The good news is that I have a new Charlie Resnick novel to chase - one that will be on my shelves as soon as I can snag a copy.