NOTTINGHAM detective Charlie Resnick’s latest case is also his last, with the popular police officer bowing out after a dozen novels with a long-buried crime from his past.

The disappearance of a woman more than 30 years before, during the height of the miners’ strike, comes back to haunt him when her body is found and the discovery pitches Resnick – and the reader – back into the heart of the conflict that split Nottingham’s pit villages and mining families apart forever.

Harvey switches between the 1980s – with flying pickets clashing with police and rumours of dodgy money flowing in to keep the strike solid – and the present day as he turns over long-hidden secrets in a bid to find the truth.

The end result is a gripping detective story and a subtle picture of the changes the UK has seen since the 1980s. It’s a fitting send-off for one of crime fiction’s top cops.

Rob Dex The Death Trade by Jack Higgins (HarperCollins, £14.99) 3/5 stars

WHEN it comes to super heroes saving the world, Sean Dillon can match James Bond anytime. His latest mission for Britain’s most secret and most successful intelligence outfit is to save the world from Armageddon and perhaps, in the process, make Britain a nuclear super power, and Dillon is soon dodging the bullets and bombs and spilling copious amounts of blood in North Africa and the Middle East.

When you think of his age, his vast alcohol intake and the violence that is part and parcel of his everyday life, you wonder how he manages to survive. But super heroes are indestructible, aren’t they?

The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons by Lawrence Block (Orion, 18.99) 3/5 stars 

ARTFUL New York burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr is as adept at cracking jokes as he is at cracking safes, but when a commission to steal an F Scott Fitzgerald manuscript and a collection of American Colonial silver spoons goes wrong, he is not amused.

Murder in not his bag, but the discovery of a dead body at the scene of his latest crime puts him right in the frame, and not just with the police. Block returns with a bang after a decade away.