Junkyard angel - John Harvey

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.