Not just another London cop with a troubled morality, Belsey whose patch is the unlikely one of affluent Hampstead, is a man very much on the skids: dishonest as they come, crooked to the nth degree and determined to survive at all cost. Somehow you end up cheering for him to overcome the terrible odds in this initial tale in which, on the point of being sacked, he comes across a corpse in a rich mansion and determines to impersonate the dead Russian oligarch and appropriate his fortune. If only it were that easy. First in a new series.
Detective Nick Belsey is broke. Now it looks like he's out of a job - something happened last night, something with the boss' wife...At dawn, on what should be the last day of Belsey's career, Hampstead CID is ghostly quiet. Belsey checks the overnight files. There's a missing-person report. But this one's different. It's on the Bishops Avenue, London's richest street. Belsey sees a scam, an escape route. But he hasn't got there first. Furiously paced and thrillingly plotted, The Hollow Man is a black love letter to London's shadow world. It marks the beginning of a seductive contemporary detective series, and the arrival of a future master of the genre.
Oliver Harris was born in north London in 1978. He has a first-class degree in English Literature and an MA in Shakespeare studies from UCL, and an MA in creative writing from UEA. He has worked in clothing warehouses, PR companies and as a TV and film extra. More recently he assisted with research in the Imperial War Museum archives, and continues to act as a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement. He is pursuing a PhD in psychoanalysis and Greek myth at Birkbeck's London Consortium.
