The Take

Description

DI Joe Faraday's Management Assistant, Vanessa Parry, is dead, killed in a head-on car smash. Her funeral is a bitter end to another grim week in the front line of the ongoing war against Portsmouth's surging crime wave. And now the seemingly untouchable DC Paul Winter, master of the scam, has been hurt in a way he could never have imagined: his wife has cancer. It's inoperable and she has barely three months to live. Paul Winter has only one instinct - to lash out. But there's precious little time for grief on a Portsmouth CID squad. A disgraced gynaecologist is missing and his caseload of maimed women is a murder-suspect list from hell. It all adds up to an impossible workload and that's without the suits and the politicians conspiring to make it even harder...

Graham Hurley is an award-winning TV documentary maker who now writes full time. He lived in Portsmouth for 20 years. He is married and has grown-up children. He now lives in Exmouth, Devon.

An ambitious police procedural epic... a splendid achievement--GUARDIAN It's not often in British crime fiction that the characters come across as real, but here they literally leap off the page. This is a stunning series, and I look forward to many more. A real joy--Mark Timlin Police procedural at its best. Tough, smart and too good to miss--Alan Furst THE TAKE is quite simply the best police procedural I've read this year--Harlan Coben