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IN A DRY SEASON
by Peter Robinson
Pan UK, January 2001
480 pages
ISBN: 0380794772


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is still in the doghouse after crossing his Chief Constable "Jimmy" Riddle. Banks is conflicted. He still loves his wife, but she left him 10 months ago for another man. He realizes that he must get on with his life, but when his son, Brian, who has graduated from University but wants to play in a band, phones, Banks gives him a hard time. On thinking about it, he is appalled that he sounds like his own parents, but before he can call him back, Riddle phones and sends Banks to Harksmere, emerging from its drowning (to increase the water supply of Leeds) 50 years earlier. A young boy, playing on the roof of an outbuilding that somehow escaped destruction, had fallen through into the mud and unearthed a skeletal hand. He is told to liaise with Sergeant Anne Cabbot, and close the case quickly.

Banks refuses to bury the skeleton without a full investigation. He and Anne discover that it is the body of Gloria Stringer, a London woman who had come to Hobb's End as a land girl and married one of the young men of of the village just before he went off to war. He was lost in Burma, but she stayed at Hobb's End, remaining friendly with her husband's sister. The young woman had been strangled, stabbed many times, wrapped in a blackout curtain, and buried in the shed.

Robinson masterfully intersperses the wartime diary of Gwen Shackleton, who later became Gloria's sister-in-law, with the present day investigation, and with the personal lives of Banks, and his family, and Cabbot. I usually dislike books that drag personal details into the story, but Robinson make it all: the wartime home front story, the current day investigation, the lives of the investigators, work as one. It would be a much weaker book if any of these elements were removed.

The US edition seems to be out of print. This is a review of the UK edition which can be purchased from Crime in Store in London (CrimeBks@aol.com)

Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, April 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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