Body & Soul

At the start of British author Harvey’s darkly atmospheric fourth and final novel featuring former Nottingham detective inspector Frank Elder (after 2006’s Darkness and Light), Elder’s estranged 23-year-old daughter, Katherine, visits him in Cornwall, where he’s been leading a hermitlike existence. When he notices cuts on her wrists and asks about them, she says it was an accident and refuses to say more. That night, she wakes up screaming from a bad dream; the next morning, she returns home to East London without saying goodbye. Elder eventually learns that his emotionally fragile daughter, who’s still recovering from being abducted and tortured when she was 16, has been pushed to the edge by becoming a person of interest in a murder. Meanwhile, the man convicted of kidnapping her escapes while being transferred to a different prison and begins killing again. Only some predictable action leading to the intense climax mars Harvey’s heart-wrenching send-off. [em]Agent: Sarah Lutyens, Lutyens & Rubinstein (U.K.). (Nov.) [/em]