Banks and his team have to start from zero; the body, though only a few years in the ground, is not identifiable and doesn't match anyone who was ever reported missing. I did not realize when I started reading that there was two parts to the story, the past and the present. You know, the SDS, as it was at first—Special Demonstration Squad—and they weren’t demonstrating washing-up liquid. He and his wife later endowed the Peter Robinson scholarship at Leeds to help students from less advantaged backgrounds study English – preferably students with an interest in creative writing. It worked for me because I enjoy entering the world where Banks resides with his solid reputation, brilliance at what he does and how he works with his team and his frequent music references that add so much.

Nick claims he passed her as he was coming home and that she indicated she was heading out of town with her new boyfriend Mark. In his off hours, he’s diligently working his way through the LP collection left to him by his friend Ray Cabbot. A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy. We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Through painstaking detective work, they eventually link the body to scandals involving undercover policing during a period of political turmoil in England more than 30 years earlier that are only now (in 2019) coming to light.

It drags a lot,the dual timelines contribute nothing and what starts as a puzzle turns into unbelievable scenarios. Robinson’s chapters bear the weight of years, spanning the period from November 1980 to December 2019. Armed with this knowledge, Banks senses there may be a connection between the moribund inquiry into Alice Poole’s death, and the body found in Gillespie’s field.His ex-girlfriend, Alice Poole, has been found murdered, and her new boyfriend Mark Woodley is missing. I’ve been told each of his previous stories conveys the same message; it’s important to get to the real story behind the story. I remarked several times on the descriptive, deep characters as well as the vivid, authentic-sounding Eastvale, Yorkshire Dales setting.

Her schoolmate, downstairs neighbor, and ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Hartley, who comes under suspicion from investigating officers DI Stuart Glassco and DC Christopher Marley in 1980, himself suspects Mark Woodcroft, the lover who replaced him before going AWOL, perhaps to Paris. If you are a first-time reader of Peter Robinson’s DCI Alan Banks criminal procedurals, you might be forgiven for thinking that a connection between an unsolved murder in 1980 and the discovery of a body in 2019 will be made through diligent police investigation. Overall, it leaves the main characters in a good place, but it makes me sad that I have to say good-bye to Banks, Annie, Gerry Masterson, and Winsome Jackman who have given me so much reading pleasure over the years. To be fair to Ray, though, it wasn’t all sixties rock, psychedelia and prog; there were a few jazz LPs, from Bechet to Bird. Peter Robinson, back in form, meaning Inspector Banks, with his eclectic musical taste and appreciation for fine food, is set to unravel a seemingly cold case with nothing more than an unearthed skeleton to go by.

This is a new author for me and I am thrilled to say I loved it and have added all his backlist to my tbr. Robinson pulls the reader in with deft characterizations, powerfully understated action scenes, and strong locales .

He is obsessed by her death, baffled by the reasons why the police have dropped the case and suspicious of her new boyfriend Mark.

One thing I will most miss from these DCI Banks novels is his eclectic taste in music, which is once again on display in this novel. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people. This book has all the things that I love about the series, except I would have loved to have had more of DI Annie Cabbot who is on leave. The second narrative is the investigation of the skeletal remains discovered by a woman digging for ancient roman artifacts.