“Damn, this book is good.”—Jon Stewart “A biting, darkly hilarious collection of personal essays that begs to be read aloud.”—Chicago Tribune Emmy Award–winning writer Adam Resnick began his career at Late Night with David Letterman before honing his chops in movies and cable television, including HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show. While courageously admitting to being “euphorically antisocial,” Resnick plunges readers deep into his troubled psyche in this uproarious memoir-in-essays. Shaped by such touchstone events as a traumatic Easter egg hunt and overwrought by obsessions, he refuses to be burdened by chores like basic social obligation and personal growth, adhering to his own steadfast rule: “I refuse to do anything I don’t want to do.”

A British police investigator looks into the murder of an abused woman: “More than a crime novel . . . a tapestry of intrigue and moral quandary” (San Francisco Chronicle). For Charlie Resnick, the night they found the body in the water was the night that Milt Jackson came to town. Resnick is a jazz fiend and considers Jackson, a contemporary of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, one of the all-time greats. He has just sat down for the concert when the call comes in about the body. Gravely disappointed, the police inspector tears across town to run the crime scene. He finds the body of a young woman who shows signs of blunt force trauma and a recently terminated pregnancy. Attempts to identify the girl, and to link her to three other bodies recently found in canals, are futile. The case goes nowhere, but Resnick always remembers the night he missed Milt Jackson. When another woman disappears, Resnick reopens the case, and finds that few places hold darker secrets than the black waters of the Nottingham canals.

A teenage thug’s apparent suicide reveals a vicious cycle of violence: “No one does the British police procedural better” (Manchester Evening News). Nicky Snape likes robbing old people. The fifteen-year-old snatches shirts from stores, purses from his teachers, and as much money as he can lift from his mother. But for an easy score he knows no better target than the elderly. When he sneaks into the home of Eric and Doris Netherfield, his footsteps wake the old couple. With a piece of steel railing he keeps by the bed for protection, Eric attempts to defend his home. He fails. Nicky fights back, battering them both to within an inch of their lives. Nottingham police inspector Charlie Resnick knows Nicky Snape, and doesn’t hesitate to arrest him. But what should be the end of the crime is only the beginning, as Snape’s arrest sparks a chain reaction of rape, suicide, and murder.

In the North of England, a cop hunts for a homicidal woman: “Smartly paced, slyly humorous, unsentimental about police work . . . one of his best” (Kirkus Reviews). Although the cop who finds the man in Alfreton Road describes him as “absolutely stark bollock naked,” that is not quite true—he is wearing a sock. The naked man is flabby, middle-aged, and bleeding heavily, in no shape to be sprinting down the street at three in the morning. After the ER doctors patch up his stab wound, the man tells the police he was attacked by a prostitute. Then he clams up, embarrassed, and refuses to even give his name. This is the fourth such recent attack reported to police inspector Charlie Resnick’s thinly stretched Nottingham police department. Two victims were salesmen; the other was a traveling Italian soccer fan, lured away from his friends by a redheaded beauty. It’s up to Resnick to find a link between the crimes, and to nab the perpetrator before more of the city’s men let their basest urges lead them into peril.

The author of the Frank Elder Mystery, Body & Soul, delivers “a powerful, first-class police procedural” (Kirkus Reviews). Raymond Cooke is looking for revenge, not corpses. It’s been six weeks since the gang of four young punks attacked him, since the one with the knife slit open his belly and left him to die on the street. After that Raymond bought a knife of his own, and has spent his nights lurking in Nottingham’s worst pubs, hoping for a chance at vengeance. Instead, walking home one night, he encounters a smell that reminds him of his work at the abattoir. It’s coming from the body of Gloria Summers. For over two months, police inspector Charlie Resnick has looked for the missing six-year-old. Now that she’s been found, Raymond Cooke becomes Resnick’s chief suspect. But to find the killer, the disheveled detective may have to look within the girl’s own family.