Good Bait [Hardcover]

I have all of John Harvey's books, The Resnick Series, which are faultless, The Frank Elder Books, The Stand-alone novels and the short stories, 'A Darker Shade of Blue' as well as the poetry. All of these I highly recommend. They are crime fiction written as literature. I am a fan; so I have been looking forward to this novel for a long period [I pre-ordered it in October] and was delighted when it was released a few weeks early and came in time for a good Christmas read. How dissapointing then that the book is such a dud.

The two plots really don't come together well, the characters fail to engage the reader on any level and the denoument of the mystery laid out on the first page gets resolved in a cursory manner on the last page outside all of the previous action. The book just doesn't work. In his acknowledgements Harvey admits to a far longer period of gestation than usual for this novel and writes online "It took an age mainly because I was trying and failing to marry two storylines with little or no apparent early connection, one featuring a black female homicide detective in London, the other a disgruntled community police officer in deepest Cornwall."Harvey beleives he finally achieved a unity between the two tales but I disagree.

I plodded through the book with gritted teeth willing it to get better - which it didn't. With Resnick left on the edge of retirement and Frank Elder long departed from one can't help wonder if Harvey has another book in him. I surely hope so but it HAS to be a lot better than this. A tremendous disappointment from the UK's premier crime writer.

With the modesty so characteristic of modern publishing, the top of the hardback jacket quotes from 'The Times': "No one in Britain is writing better crime fiction". In case we miss that, at the foot of the page we are reminded that the book is "From the Master of British crime writing". In this case, though, the plaudits are entirely justified - John Harvey's writing is of a quality not often seen in the genre, and no living British crime writer can compete with the range, depth and overall standard of his output. Unhappily, 'Good Bait' is by no means his best work.

The tale begins with the discovery of the naked body of a teenage youth frozen below the surface of one of the Hampstead ponds. The officer in charge is Karen Shields, a young, black DCI, whose line manager DCS Burcher talks of 'plundering the minority thing' and is clearly less than fully supportive. Shields is supported by a pair of chalk-and-cheese sergeants. Mike Ramsden, her long-term bag-carrier, is old school and rough-edged, whilst Tim Costello, a Liverpudlian of Irish-Chinese extraction, is university educated and possessed of a voice "with which he could have read the Radio 4 News without causing a flutter". They work well together, and their characters are well fleshed out in the course of the book. The team has a healthy caseload of violent crimes under enquiry, and the body count rises as the story develops.

There is also secondary narrative, featuring Penzance-based DI Trevor Cordon, disillusioned and approaching retirement. Earlier in his career, he played an instrumental part in helping young teenage drug user Rose Carlin to regain at least some measure of control of her life. Almost fifteen years later, Cordon is approached by Carlin's still-addicted mother, Maxine. Rose, now living in London, has disappeared, and Maxine wants Cordon to find her. Cordon explains that there's not much he can do; Rose is now approaching thirty and is a free agent, but he offers to make a few phone calls to see what he can discover. That doesn't satisfy Maxine, who says that she will go to London herself. A few days later, the local newspaper reports her death after falling in front of a tube train. For reasons not entirely clear to himself, Cordon decides to take the substantial arrears of leave to which he is entitled and heads for London, where he calls in a favour from ex-cop private investigator Jack Kiley - a character who has featured in several of John Harvey's short stories, but is here promoted to a supporting role in a full-length novel.

The principal narrative introduces a bewildering array of crimes and characters. In some respects I was reminded of the 'Gideon' novels by J. J. Marric (a nom-de-plume of the ultra-prolific John Creasey) which were part of my staple reading as a teenager. The novel approach of that series was to follow the parallel progress - or lack of progress - of the entire caseload of a senior officer over a relatively short period. Harvey is a much better writer than Creasey ever aspired to be, but Creasey's experience of plotting (he wrote 600 novels - mostly in the crime genre - during his 40-year career) was such that the typical reader could easily keep abreast of the multiple storylines. When reading 'Good Bait', I had some trouble remembering the names of minor characters, both criminals and victims, and in recollecting which crime was meant when only the location was mentioned. In short, there was a degree of 'woolliness' in both plotting and construction which I have not detected in Harvey's previous novels. By contrast, the secondary narrative is much simpler and very easy to follow.

My main criticism, however, centres on the interaction between the storylines. They are clearly meant to converge, but there is no real sense of convergence and, when the contact eventually occurs, it felt (to me, at least) at best tangential. There is little sense that the outcome of either strand of the storyline is meaningfully dependent upon the other. I also agree with the criticism made by another reviewer, that the solution to the crime with which the book opens is provided literally on the final page in what almost seems to be an afterthought, and that interesting questions about the victim which arose in the course of the early investigation are left unanswered.

Finally - and I accept that I may well be alone in this respect - I am becoming increasingly irritated by overemphasis of the musical and culinary preferences of the principal characters. When this trend began, some years ago, it gave welcome additional insights into what made characters tick, but in the intervening period it has been overused by so many writers that it no longer adds depth to the reader's perceptions.

In all of the foregoing, my criticisms are based upon comparison of 'Good Bait' to John Harvey's previous output. That means that, although it falls short of my expectations, it is still an above average crime novel. It doesn't work as well as it might, but potential readers should not be deterred by my comments - other reviewers have obviously enjoyed it very much, and whatever else it may be, it definitely isn't boring. I'll certainly be pre-ordering Harvey's next offering.

I really look forward to John Harvey's books but I am afraid I found this book a great disappointment. I could not see the connection between the two police officers and the story lines just did not gel. Neither of the story lines was strong enough to make this book interesting and I did not found either of the police officers believable. A black, 6 foot tall, bisexual, female officer and a white, middle aged, straight male officer pathetically attracted to a prostitute seemed to have been created to fill the role of being 'politically correct' but unfortunately this did not come across. I do hope his next book reverts back to his usual brilliant form.