Wasted Years, as before, is set almost exclusively in Nottingham, and even though the city is never actually mentioned by name, it haunts the pages just as surely as any fantasy creation. An armed gang are stalking its streets and their reported exploits play unwitting parent to Darren, an ex-bortal boy with ill-considered dreams of a life of violent crime himself, dragging the diminutive, reluctant Keith in his wake. The big boys, however, awake memories of a decade previous, where James Prior led an equally ruthless band before being run to ground by Resnick and his colleagues. And as luck would have it, now Prior is up for parole and fears abound for the safety of the wife who put him inside.

Wasted Years is, therefore, very much of its type - the detailing and development of the investigating team in particular - and yet far more ambitious than its predecessors. Key change is a brief prologue from 1969 and, more tellingly, a substantial flashback in its central section to events in 1981 as the police track Prior's gang and Resnick's marriage begins to fail. This material provides not only a solid backbone to the unfolding plot here, but helps with its back story to raise Resnick himself above the liberal lawman and collection of mannerisms he has often been reduced to in the other books - the cats named for jazz greats, the exotic sandwiches, etc. This is both refreshing and welcome to veterans of his cases and will serve him well as he begins to develop (especially with the help of TV) into a strong series character.

In the past, for all he has built solid, well-reasoned foundations for the books, John Harvey has suffered a tendency to rush at finales like the proverbial bull in a china-shop, often overloading with cheap whodunits or farcical twists of plot (Cutting Edge comes to mind as a glaring example). Here though he handles the disparate elements with more assurity than ever before, witnessing a lesson or two from better US crime writing in the development of the different strands of event and character being allowed to dominate a mood and atmosphere over any pretence towards a revelatory climax, slightly recalling the best of the Resnick novels, Rough Treatment.

Which is not to say that Wasted Years is perfect - one particular discovery late on does tend to hinge on a rather convenient coincidence rather than the procedural policing that leads up, and the resolution, despite a neat double-take on expectations, tends to feel a little rushed given all that precedes. Those slight caveats aside however, Wasted Years is by some distance Harvey's most complete work to date, and a substantially satisfying read in its own right.