Next, she left a message for Detective Superintendent Catherine Gervaise, who was in a meeting at County HQ in Northallerton. While the prose for this novel is decent enough and the characters are still mostly enjoyable, the novel overall seems extremely weak and perhaps unfinished. This is an excellent detective story with outstanding character and location descriptions, a credible narrative and a fascinating insight into police procedures. The only good thing I can really say for it is that it really makes you pay attention to the fine line that separates superb writing from, well, this.

Dirty Dick' Burgess does the equivalent of a 'cameo' if you are a novel character, but it's really small this time. Only Sheriff Alan Pangborn suspects that Gaunt is behind the population's increasingly violent behavior. Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. I will say now that I could have added a whole load more quotations to support my arguments but, to be honest, I have already spent a lot longer on this than the book is worth.If he wanted to engage, entertain and keep readers rapidly turning pages to find out what's next, he failed. More and more, his own words about the victim's latest production, Othello, are coming back to haunt him, for "jealousy, betrayal, envy, ambition, greed, lust, revenge: all the colors of darkness" are quickly becoming his world as well. The answers will link Hardcastle’s latest work on Othello to the government post Silbert retired from, but in a maddeningly inconclusive way that yields a high degree of realism but a conclusion that drags on forever. There is a sub plot of some knife crime which was used as a device to allow banks and his team to carry on with the investigation of the murder/homicide after being warned off by superior powers, so I can understand why Robinson included it. Now in his 50s and having served as the crime-solving protagonist of 17 previous novels by Peter Robinson, Inspector Banks deserves it.

His Civil Service pay as a member of the Security Services wouldn't have made it possible, although spies have been known to feather their own nests out of the money which doesn't get accounted for on their operations. A beautiful June day in the Yorkshire Dales, and a group of children are spending the last of their half-term freedom swimming in the river near Hipswell Woods. Robinson needs a new editor who can slash out the rubbish and smack him down when he tries to over-reach himself.Evan Evans is a young police constable who has traded in the violence of city life for idyllic Llanfair, a Welsh village tucked far away from trouble. When they had finished photographing and examining the body in situ, they cut it down, careful to preserve the knot, and laid it on a stretcher the coroner’s officer supplied.

Robinson obviously has larger issues he wants to address in this book, but in doing so, I think he has written a book that falls short of the standards he set earlier in the series, and I hope that he will allow Banks and Cabbot to get back into their usual routines ASAP. And a stubborn policeman who will not be frightened away could lose everything in one terrifying, explosive instant. Author Peter Robinson and his protagonist, Chief Inspector Alan Banks, never fail to entertain or disappoint. But I've said that before and Robinson has surprised me by finding a way to bring some spark back to the series.

In addition to a token payment, Gaunt requests that each person perform a little "deed", usually a seemingly innocent prank played on someone else from town. I will say we have a lot of science fiction, and a lot of mysteries, a lot of them from certain authors. When a house explodes in a quiet Oxford suburb and a young girl disappears in the aftermath, Sarah Tucker becomes obsessed with finding her.