Investigating the Police

Watching the Dark (An Inspector Banks novel) by Peter Robinson (William Morrow hardcover, 8 January 2013).

The first Inspector Banks novel, Gallows View, was originally released in 1987, and the timeline of the books has followed the timeline of reality. 

Alan Banks has gone from a happily married detective living in a small town with his wife and two young children to a divorced Detective Chief Inspector living alone in a cottage on the moors.

Here, Banks is called in to investigate the murder of a fellow policeman, Detective Inspector Bill Quinn.  Quinn was recuperating at St. Peter's Police Treatment Centre, which happens to be located within Banks' jurisdiction. 

Quinn was walking in grounds of the Centre in the late evening, presumably indulging in a cigarette, when he was shot with an arrow from a crossbow. 

Since Quinn was a policeman, an officer from Professional Standards, Joanna Passero, is brought in to work with Banks on the case.  As when Annie Cabbot (now a member of Banks' team) shadowed him representing Professional Standards in Aftermath, Banks is not pleased about his temporary companion.

But they soon become aware of the possibility that Quinn might have been a crooked cop.  Although his superiors seem convinced that this is true, Banks is not, and does his best to prove he's right.

Peter Robinson is a master of Story, and with Watching the Dark he has created another well-constructed, engrossing mystery tale.  Banks has grown not only older, but more introspective over the years, and the reader shares his point of view for much of the novel. 

As one who's been reading the series since the very beginning, I can't say for certain that it's easy to jump in this far into the series.  Starting with this book, however, will take away the pleasure of experiencing Alan Banks' development as a detective and a person during the span of 25 years.




FTC full disclosure:  Many thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the book.  

Alone in a country house...

Before the Poison by Peter Robinson.

A review by Marlyn Beebe.

Chris Lowndes is a successful film score composer, well-known in the business and financially very comfortable.  Having promised himself he'd return home at the age of sixty,  he  buys an isolated country house near the Yorkshire town where he grew up.  He hadn't expected to be doing it without his wife at his side, but she'd died a few months earlier.  He goes anyway, telling himself he needs solitude to work on the piano sonata he's always wanted to compose.

Having completed the purchase well before he returns to England, Lowndes is unsure what to expect when he arrives at the house late one October afternoon.  He certainly doesn't expect to learn that the wife of the original owner, a physician named Ernest Fox, had been convicted of murdering him.

Out of curiosity, Lowndes begins to research the history of the house and it's early inhabitants.   The more he learns about Grace Fox and her family, the more he becomes convinced that she was not guilty of the crime.  Although he knows better than to tell anyone, he thinks he catches glimpses of her around the house.  People begin to accuse him of being obsessed with Grace and her story, and it certainly appears that way, though Chris believes that all he's trying to do is uncover the truth. 

Throughout Lowndes' search, the reader has the uncomfortable feeling that there is some underlying reason for  his investigation.  It's not expressed outright, but extremely subtle hints that this is the case permeate the narrative, very much in the vein of Rebecca, 

In fact, as in Du Maurier's novel, although the narrative is in the first person from the protagonist's point of view, the central character of the story is a ghost whose history somehow becomes intertwined with that of the narrator. 

As a devotee of Robinson's Inspector Banks, I was at first disappointed that Before the Poison was not part of that series.  But this is such a well-written and well-told tale that the sadness was short-lived.

Peter Robinson is the author of the now 16-book Inspector Alan Banks mystery series, the first of which, Gallows View, was published in 1987.  The next DCI Banks book is set to be released in the UK in August.