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This may be billed as a DCI Banks Novel, but Alan Banks is now Detective Superintendent and the elevation has certain consequences. He no longer can be as directly involved in an investigation as he used to be, leaving the nuts and bolts to others, like DI Annie Cabot, DS Winsome Jackman, and DC Gerry Masterson. He is the only male detective left on the Eastvale Murder and Major Crimes squad. (Yes, we've come a long way since the early days of a resolutely though not exclusively male constabulary.) But, although his role is largely advisory, he still can get out of the office and involve himself directly when something interesting turns up in Eastvale. So when a dead body is found, he takes part in the preliminary investigation, though he leaves much of the running to Winsome. And in short order, another body turns up on the Yorkshire moors.
The circumstances in which two dead bodies are found are certainly puzzling enough, though there does not appear to be much connecting the two. First a young woman wearing party clothes is found in an abandoned car beside a country road. How she got there is unclear, especially since the car sports a POLICE AWARE notice that indicates that it had been checked out by a police patrol that would certainly have noticed a dead body had it been there at the time. The second is also puzzling. A middle-aged man dressed in a business suit and wearing street shoes is found, his neck broken presumably in a fall, in a gully on the high moors. Once again, the mystery is how did he get there? Presumably he could not have been out for a back-country hike dressed in those clothes (though of course, if he had been, the shoes might explain his accident). There is no firm evidence that either died as the result of foul play.
So Eastvale Murder sets about the painstaking legwork required to get to the bottom of events. Robinson is wonderfully precise without being tedious in covering the procedural details, alternating them with passages drawn from Banks' private life, some of which involve a pleasant evening with Annie Cabot, her father, and her father's new partner, Zelda, who is some thirty years his junior.
This is the 25th appearance for Alan Banks and, truth be told, he is getting on a bit. He seems curiously to lack a certain energy, not to speak of appearing a bit remote from his younger colleagues. His reminiscences about the music of his youth tend to date him a little too much - he would seem to be much closer in age to Annie's father than his active-duty status would suggest. Still, if Banks is getting a little tired, his colleagues are not and manage to solve the mysterious deaths in short order. The reader who pays attention will too.
Zelda provides a link to a villain who got away with attempted murder some years ago. He surfaces and slips off once again, providing a foretaste of DCI Banks, #26, and an attractive prospect it is indeed.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2018
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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