Harpur and Iles Series

Ron "Planner" Preston has enjoyed a long criminal career out of jail. Caution, if anything, has been the key to his success. So a payroll van with a predictable route and minimal guard looks like a quick easy take. When the truck's schedule is abruptly changed and its guard doubled, however, Preston much either abandon the plan altogether or take on some young and risky new recruits, ones who may consider his habitual wariness a sign of the timidity of old age.Harpur and his boss, Assistant Chief Constable Iles, are accustomed to keeping an eye on men like Preston, not so difficult a task in a milieu where cops and criminals meet on many levels: professional, familial, social. Therefore, they are quick to take notice of increased activity surrounding "Planner" on the part of his family and associates. But how are these moves to be interpreted? And where is the line between certainty and conjecture to be drawn? As one criminal aptly observes, "Chance matters."

Kill Me

by Bill James

Published 9 March 2001

After the Eton Crop shoot-out, DCS Colin Harpur's priority is to protect his officer, Naomi Anstruther. But she has no intention of playing it safe...Naomi's undercover operation among the drugs gang has ended in a bloody shoot-out on the Eton Boating Song. She has escaped harm but her friends Donald and Lyndon are dead. However, it is not the consequences of this violent confrontation which have left Naomi vulnerable. Nor is it the instability of the drug underworld as a London gang attempts to take over. Nor is it the shameless behavious of Naomi's superior officer ACC Desmond Iles, or the slow disintegration of Chief Constable Lane. No, the biggest danger to Naomi now lies in the small, delicate form of a girl called Esme. For Esme wants to avenge Donald's and Lyndon's deaths. But she does not understand the danger she is about to unleash...

The Girl with the Long Back

by Bill James

Published 13 November 2003

With the rumored transfer of Chief of Police Mark Lane, London's competitive drug lords are on edge. In the past, Desmond Iles has managed to maintain the peace on the streets in an old-fashioned system of give a little, take a little. But with a dangerous mix of greed and fear, the looming threat of a stricter police force, and three sudden deaths, all sides are preparing themselves for a full-scale battle of the ugliest kind. A deliciously witty addition to a classic series, The Girl with the Long Back heightens the urgency and pace of the tantalizing London underworld in which cops and criminals, and all of their clever asides, are sketched in fantastic detail.

Halo Parade

by Bill James

Published 13 April 1987

First time in U.S. paperback, the third in Bill James's "standout," "witty," "well above the ordinary" series (starred reviews, Publishers Weekly, Booklist). When Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur places young policeman Ray Street undercover in a vicious drug gang, the entire department knows the risks. If Street is found out, he will take his place in "the halo parade." Then the killing of a fellow officer will have to be avenged, by whatever means . . .

Roses, Roses

by Bill James

Published 22 October 1993

Megan Harpur took the train back from London to tell her husband she was leaving him for another man. By the time Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur discovered her in the station parking lot in the early hours of the morning, there was nothing anyone could do. Who had committed this savage killing? What did Megan's lover's nervous, secret activities have to do with it? The crime confronts Harpur with the most unnerving case of his career.

"Bill James's Harpur and Iles books are deliciously unsavoury: a brilliant combination of almost Jacobean savagery and sexual betrayal with a tart comedy of contemporary manners. A stylised world that is several moves from reality, and about as real as you can get." — John Harvey, "The Crime Writer's Crime Writer," Guardian "There is nothing else quite like this series of police procedurals. James is concerned with the dilemmas and difficulties of policing Britain's inner cities, and he addresses these in hard-edged narratives that leave readers gasping and flinching, praying the people in these stories never come to live in their streets....It's all delivered in a ferociously poetic voice that is uniquely Bill James." — The Times [London], "100 Masters of Crime"; "James makes his grimmest, most acid sortie yet into the tangled domestic and working lives of his ferocious fuzz."—John Coleman, Sunday Times [London]

Club

by Bill James

Published 24 January 1991

Suspects in the fatal bludgeoning of lowlife Ian Aston include his criminal pals - and Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur's superior officer Desmond Iles, whose wife, Sarah, was having an affair with Aston.

As Harpur appears to take Aston's place in Sarah's affections, local club owner Ralph Ember takes over the dead man's spot in the criminal hierarchy, becoming a reluctant participant in a bank scheme that seems cursed from the start.

'The tortuous private lives of James's policemen are often more savage than the crimes they investigate . . . Mr James is bruisingly good' Sunday Telegraph

I Am Gold

by Bill James

Published 2 November 2010

A street shooting which leaves a mother and child dead on the school run. But was this a random act of violence? Unlikely, when it transpires the victims were the wife and son of well known drugs baron Mansel Shale.

Having committed this atrocity, the gunman flees to a charity shop where very soon a hostage situation develops and Harpur and Iles are brought in to oversee the siege - which ends in sudden action and tragedy.

But as subsequent events unfold, it appears the gunman was on target; he wasn't after Shale after all, but his wife - who was certainly not what all had assumed her to be...

Astride a Grave

by Bill James

Published 10 October 1991

When a large chunk of a bank heist vanishes, the thugs who pulled off the job - and survived - are a little upset. One of them, it appears, has different ideas about sharing the loot fairly and it soon becomes every man for himself.

Now, Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur is on the case. This is a search for high stakes, a search in which the competitors will stop at nothing. Not even murder.

'James has to be the funniest crime writer now trespassing on that twilight territory where fuzz and felons make their moves and talk their humorous heads off, with menace constantly rippling beneath the surface' Sunday Times