Junkyard Angel & Neon Madman - Paperback

by John Harvey (Author)

A pair of violent mystery novels starring London detective Scott Mitchell, the groundbreaking PI who introduced Britain to hardboiled crime fiction.

Junkyard Angel starts with Scott Mitchell deciding to sneak into a flat he's supposed to be watching from across the road to avoid freezing to death. It's the worst decision he'll ever make. He's just stepped inside when a blackjack cracks him across the skull, and he crashes to the floor, unconscious. When he comes to, he finds a photo of a beautiful woman--and a dead girl lying on the bed. Mitchell has fallen face-first into a murder scene, and it won't be long before he's wishing he'd frozen instead.

In Neon Madman, Mitchell is trying to stay out of trouble by doing some safe, sleazy divorce work--so why is somebody trying to kill him? When a West Indian man bursts into his office threatening to tear him apart, Mitchell talks him down before the man is able to breaks any of his limbs--or, God forbid, his camera--but he still hasn't got a clue who the intruder is, or how he's tied up in the adultery case. And when this supposedly simple case goes from quick and easy to slow and deadly, Mitchell will have to move fast if he wants to stay alive.

Written in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald, Junkyard Angel and Neon Madman are hardboiled classics. From the pen of the creator of legendary sleuth Charlie Resnick, these two novels hit as hard as a double bourbon--or two bullets to the skull.

Author Biography

John Harvey (b. 1938) is an incredibly prolific British mystery writer. The author of more than one hundred books, as well as poetry and scripts for television and radio, Harvey did not begin writing professionally until 1975. Until then he was a teacher, educated at Goldsmiths College, London, who taught literature, drama, and film at colleges across England. After cutting his teeth on paperback fiction, Harvey debuted his most famous character, Charlie Resnick, in 1989's Lonely Hearts, which the English Times called one of the finest crime novels of the century.

A police inspector noted for his love of both sandwiches and jazz, Resnick has starred in eleven novels and one volume of short stories. The BBC has adapted two of the Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts and Rough Treatment (1990), for television movies. Both starred Academy Award-nominated actor Tom Wilkinson and had screenplays written by Harvey. Besides writing fiction, Harvey spent over twenty years as the head of Slow Dancer Press. He continues to live and write in London.