A GOOD YEAR FOR THE ROSES

A reissue of the first in the tough crime series about private eye Nick Sharman, London's answer to Elmore Leonard.

Nick Sharman is nobody's favorite person. Ex-cop, ex-doper, invalided out of the Met after a stray bullet in the foot saved him from an investigation into the missing evidence from a drugs haul. The cops don't like him. The villains don't like him. Sharman is unemployable. So he's hired himself an office and set up shop as a private investigator in his south London patch. Divorces and debt-collecting were what he expected. What he gets is Patsy Bright, young, pretty, and missing. Her father wants her back. She's a good girl, a model, and only a little bit into drugs. With Sharman's connections it should be a piece of cake. Only when he comes to with a split head, a pocketful of planted heroin, a dead girl, and two policemen acting on a tip-off, does Sharman realize this case is different. And serious. And personal. Timlin writes very groovy hard-boiled British crime with vintage flavor — because it is vintage now. It's terrific writing, Mark Timlin is the author of more than 30 novels, including All the Empty Places, Answers from the Grave, Guns of Brixton, and Stay Another Day, as well as Gangsters' Wives and Lipstick Killers under the pseudonym Lee Martin. His Nick Sharman novels were made into a television series starring Clive Owen.