Robinson, Peter Books

Gallows View: The First Inspector Banks Mystery

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 33 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great Debut 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

GALLOWS VIEW is the first entry in the "Inspector Banks" series, and I found it very enjoyable. Banks is a big city British policeman who re-locates his job and family to a more rural part of the country. GALLOWS VIEW contains three separate crimes that Banks tries to solve -- a peeping tom, a series of burglaries, and a murder of an old woman.

This novel isn't terribly exciting, but it's a well done whodunit that has some very good characterization. Some of the "womens lib" dialogue is pretty dated, but it plays a minor role in the story. I found Banks a likable character, and I found the story interesting enough to devour in a few sittings. Robinson is a fine writer, and his prose is highly readable.

Despite the UK setting, I found everything in this book pretty easy to understand from an American perspective. This book is sexually graphic in spots, but not in a way that is particularly offensive.

GALLOWS VIEW is apparently Robinson's very first novel, and the Inspector Banks books apparently get better as they go along. As a result, I look forward to reading more books in this series, and encourage other readers to check them out.

Editorial Review:

Former London policeman Alan Banks relocated to Yorkshire seeking some small measuer of peace. But depravity and violence are unfortunately not unique to large cities. His new venue, the quaint little village of Eastvale, seems to have more than its fair share of malefactors--among them a brazen Peeping Tom who hides in night's shadows spying on attractrive, unsuspecting ladies as they prepare for bed. And when an elderly woman is found brutally slain in her home, Chief Inspector Banks wonders if the voyeur has increased the awful intensity of his criminal activities. But whether relatied or not, perverse local acts and murderous ones are combining to profoundly touch Banks's suddenly vulnerable perosonal life, forcing a dedicated law officer to make hard choices he'd dearly hoped would never be necessary.

A Dedicated Man (Inspector Banks Mysteries)

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Not a bad mystery, but could have been better 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is the second in the series set in Yorkshire and featuring DCI Alan Banks, a London refugee just beginning to adapt to Northern ways. The story this time is set in a small community up the valley from the market town of Eastvale, where the police station is located. A retired academic with a mania for industrial archaeology and the inheritance to indulge it has been killed and his body left in a farmer's field. His immediate circle includes a local entrepreneur, an ex-folk singer returned home in disillusion, the local doctor, and another "incomer," an author of mystery novels (which allows Robinson to get in a few tongue-in-cheek digs). But then a teenage girl whose precocity and theatrical ambitions lead her to poke into matters on her own becomes the second victim. Where the first book spent a lot of time on the Chief Inspector's wife and family (necessarily setting the scene and establishing the characters), this one is much more the traditional police procedural, focusing on the murder itself, the suspects, and Banks's tireless efforts to pin the former on one of the latter. The denouement isn't exactly a deus ex machina, but I didn't think the reader received sufficient clues to even begin to logically identify the culprit. Robinson's beautifully orchestrated background narrative about life in rural Yorkshire, however, is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Editorial Review:

A dedicated man is dead in the Yorkshire dales -- a former university professor, wealthy historian and archaeologist who loved his adopted village. It is a particularly heinous slaying, considering the esteem in which the victim, Harry Steadman, was held by his neighbors and colleagues -- by everyone, it seems, except the one person who bludgeoned the life out of the respected scholar and left him half-buried in a farmer's field.

Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks left the violence of London behind for what he hoped would be the peaceful life of a country policeman. But the brutality of Steadman's murder only reinforces one ugly, indisputable truth: that evil can flourish in even the most bucolic of settings. There are dangerous secrets hidden in the history of this remote Yorkshire community that have already led to one death. And Banks will have to plumb a dark and shocking local past to find his way to a killer before yesterday's sins cause more blood to be shed.

Friend of the Devil

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

I can name that tune in...... 2 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Peter Robinson writes easy going British police procedurals that are generally quite well done. Alas author Robinson seems to be losing it in some regards. I recoiled in horror when I was informed that main series character Chief Inspector Banks has purchased an ipod. Robinson has this strange literary gimmick of telling the reader what music is playing when we ride along in Bank's car, when we stop to have lunch with him in a pub, when we are riding in an elevator, when he is at a party, and when he is about to go to bed. And now that Banks has an ipod we can constantly be informed as to what notes are flooding the Inspector's brain. It's bad enough that I usually don't like a single bit of the music that seems to entrance Mr. Banks, but when the musical program information intrudes constantly you want nothing more than to grab his ipod and smash it against a wall.

Well enough of that. Here's my other problem with this particular novel. It is a continuation of a novel that Robinson wrote about seven years ago. While bits and pieces of the original book's plot are scattered throughout this book, there is no thorough exposition of the original book's plot. I did read the source book (Aftermath), but sometimes couldn't remember enough parts of it to make Friend of the Devil a completely understandable read. One of the characters in the book Aftermath seems to be on a killing spree, and Banks and his on again off again girl friend Inspector Cabbot are trying to find the killer.

Many of Robinson's novels, like this one, could be done as a play, because much of what goes on in the books are interrogations. We are forever, with or without music, sitting down and interviewing suspects or witnesses. In this book Robinson brings in two male-female relationships that just go nowhere. Chekov once said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." This book starts out with Annie Cabbot having a one night stand with someone much younger than her. The aftermath of that encounter gets stranger and stranger, and you wonder where this is going to lead. Well it turns out to be a "pistol" that shouldn't have been hung on the wall.

I've always liked Robinson's easy going crime novels, but this one wasn't much fun. The reader really should be better informed about the story in Aftermath that preceded this book. The music problem? It sounds trivial, but it's not especially when you consider that the author also seems obligated to tell you exactly how each character is dressed, and to describe in detail the décor of each house he walks into. Even books have to be discussed. I was surprised when I found out that Annie Cabbot is reading the same book that I am: Tony Judt's modern history book "Post War." Does that spike your interest? I didn't think so, but that's about exciting as this book gets.

Editorial Review:

Amazon Significant Seven, February 2008: Fans of Kate Atkinson's Jackson Brodie novels, and anyone who enjoyed In the Woods as much as we did, will love Peter Robinson's smart and absorbing Friend of the Devil. Be sure to set aside some time to dig in--you'll be tempted to devour it in one sitting, but this gripping and finely plotted mystery deserves to be savored. If this is your first introduction to the intrepid Inspector Alan Banks, count yourself lucky--Robinson has been crafting these award-winning police procedurals for more than two decades now, so there are plenty of opportunities to enjoy what Stephen King has called "the best series of British novels since the novels of Patrick O'Brian." --Daphne Durham

Past Reason Hated: An Inspector Banks Mystery

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

An excellent piece of work 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

The novel just before this one in the DCI Alan Banks series, _The Hanging Valley_, was pretty lackluster, but Robinson springs back in this one with a major winner. A young woman is found murdered in her own parlor by her lesbian partner, Veronica, a classical recording playing over and over on the stereo. Caroline had been involved in a local amateur theater production of _Twelfth Night_ -- nice bit of irony there, and a plot-point as well if you pay attention -- and the director and the other cast members are all suspects. So is Veronica's ex-husband, so is the husband's current girlfriend, and so is Caroline's emotionally strained teenage brother, all with different and quite reasonable possible motives. The plot becomes more complex but it won't necessarily stay that way, a point the author has the Chief Inspector make several times. Banks is a humane man, not ordinarily quick to judge, and his growing regard for Veronica is very nicely rendered. Also heavily involved is newly-promoted DC Susan Gay -- an unfortunate surname, in the circumstances -- who was only a spear-carrier in the earlier installments. She's young and bright and has a great deal to learn, not least of which is to distrust her prejudices. The writing is smooth, the plotting holds together, the pace and the atmosphere of Eastdale in a rather bleak Christmas season are very well done, and the characterization is excellent. The best of the series so far.

Editorial Review:

A picturesque Yorkshire village is dressed in its finest for the upcoming Noel. But one of its residents will not be celebrating this holiday.

Chief Inspector Alan Banks knows that secrecy can sometimes prove fatal'and secrets were the driving force behindCaroline Hartley's life…and death. She was a beautiful enigma, brutally stabbed in her own home three days prior to Christmas. Leaving her past behind for a forbidden love affair, she mystified more than a few. And now she is dead, clothed only in her unshared mysteries and her blood. In this season of giving and forgiving, Banks is eager to absolve the innocent of their sins. But that must wait until the many facets of a perplexing puzzle are exposed and the dark circle of his investigation finally closes…and when a killer makes the next move.

A Necessary End

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Murder + politics = a better than average mystery 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This third outing for DCI Banks of Eastvale in north Yorkshire includes a generally well thought out plot, though the clues to the reader are a bit thin -- but it's the characters who really stand out. There's a small anti-nuclear demonstration on the town square which turns into a brawl when the police attack the demonstrators and one of the out-of-town cops is knifed. For political reasons, a special investigator is sent up from London -- a right-wing bully-boy named Brewster interested only in fitting up one of the local anti-government politicals for the murder rather than actually solving the crime. He outranks Banks, who is forced to go along with his illegal methods, at least for awhile. Most of the suspicion centers on a communal farmstead where half a dozen artistic activists live and work, and the reader is given plenty of reason to suspect most of them at one point or another. The actual (anticlimatic) solution, however, involves bringing in a new character and new information in the last chapter, which isn't quite playing fair, is it? I really enjoy Robinson's style, though, and the fact that Banks is a very human (and generally humane) person. Though the loathsome Burgess is probably more typical as a cop. (It's also obvious that Robinson has never had to deal with white cops in the American South, who could make Burgess look like a saint.) My only other complaint is that the author makes rather too much, and in an annoyingly detailed way, of Banks taste for American blues music.

Editorial Review:

A peaceful demonstration in the normally quiet town of Eastvale ended with fifty arrests -- and the brutal stabbing death of a young constable. But Chief Inspector Alan Banks fears there is worse violence in the offing. For CID Superintendent Richard "Dirty Dick" Burgess has arrived from London to take charge of the investigation, fueled by professional outrage and volatile, long-simmering hatreds.

Almost immediately, Burgess descends with vengeful fury upon the members of a sixties-style commune -- while Banks sifts through the rich Yorkshire soil around him, turning over the earthy, unsettling secrets of seemingly placid local lives. Crossing "Dirty Dick" could cost the Chief Inspector his career. But the killing of a flawed Eastvale policeman is not the only murder that needs to be solved here. And if Banks doesn't unmask the true assassin, his superior's misguided obsession might well result in further bloodshed.

Blood at the Root (An Inspector Banks Mystery)

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Banks Number Nine: Worthwhile 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

A young man is beaten to death in an alleyway at night. The plot thickens when his identity is discovered: Jason Fox, a leading light of the Albion League, a thoroughly unpleasant extreme right racist fringe group. As DCI Banks and DC Susan Gay piece the details of Fox's nasty story together, their lives complicate in other ways. Susan is embarking on a relationship with Gavin, a colleague from regional HQ. Meanwhile the state of Banks' marriage is going from bad to worse as is his relationship with his boss Chief Constable Jimmy Riddle. This book, whose British title is `Dead Right', didn't seem to me to be quite as good as its predecessor `Innocent Graves' but is nonetheless another pretty strong and worthwhile procedural from Robinson.

Editorial Review:

There's a deliberate lack of excessive angst and glamour in Peter Robinson's books about Inspector Alan Banks and his fellow Yorkshire coppers, so first-time readers might think them bland. But under the books' placid surfaces, whole worlds of crime and justice are being worked out. In this ninth book in his increasingly popular series, Robinson gives Banks some serious problems of a personal and professional nature: a neglected wife and a ruthlessly ambitious superior. He also drops Banks into a frighteningly realistic neo-Nazi group called the Albion League, whose activities include drug dealing and murder. Other books in the series available in paperback include Innocent Graves, Final Account, Gallow's View, and Hanging Valley.

In a Dry Season

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Detective chief inspector Alan Banks is a walking midlife crisis, full of rage because of his recently failed marriage, a career crippled by a jealous superior, and problems with his son. In less skilled hands, Banks could have quickly become a royal pain, but Robinson makes him instead a very likable character, who is slightly baffled and bemused by his bad luck. When he criticizes his son Brian's decision to drop out of college to become a rock musician, Banks quickly regrets it--recognizing the same impulses that made him rebel against his own parents, and some of the pain he felt when a college friend died of a drug overdose. The realization that Brian's heavy-metal band is actually quite good brings genuine pleasure to a man whose idea of rock is Love's Forever Changes and other 1970s delights.

Banks is assigned to work on a case that the Yorkshire police department considers to be somewhat of a joke. The skeleton of a woman wrapped in World War II blackout curtains has been found in a dried-out reservoir. This man-made watering hole was a village--Hobbs End--that had been flooded many years earlier. Through the journal of a major player we realize early on who the dead woman is, but a large part of the fun is watching Banks and an edgy, attractive female cop put the pieces of the puzzle together. In a Dry Season is a stylish and gently reflective tale of secrets and lies.

Banks's other books include Wednesday's Child, Final Account, and Blood at the Root. --Dick Adler

Aftermath: A Novel of Suspense

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Penzler Pick, October 2001: The mystery novels of Peter Robinson (Aftermath is his 12th) are of increasing power and intensified intelligence. It's a dirty little secret of the crime-fiction genre that many of its writers simply spin their wheels, repeating over and over those old tricks which always have worked for them. They coast on past successes and repeat the formula hoping, if not assuming, that their fans won't notice.

Writers like Robinson, however, actually seem to grow in front of our eyes, delivering books of greater complexity each time. His previous two books, Cold Is the Grave and In a Dry Season, were novels of character and novels of crime, equally, and now Aftermath is here to reward his fans and new readers alike.

Like recent books by fellow English writers Reginald Hill, Val McDermid, and Stephen Booth, Aftermath centers upon a grim case in which attractive young girls have disappeared, victims of a cunning psychotic killer whose identity is well concealed behind a façade of respectability. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks of the Yorkshire Police is in charge of the case, but he's also got unavoidable personal distractions. His separated wife, Sandra, is pregnant by her lover, Sean, and wanting the divorce he's been dragging his heels over.

There is nothing cozy about the kind of English mysteries written by Peter Robinson, even if they do take place where picturesque rural villages make up the landscape. He's not afraid of gore or deviance, of violence, or of any of the baser emotions, and it's a raw old world behind the hedgerows and cottage walls. If Aftermath is your first taste of his tough-tender sensibility, it won't be surprising if you soon are hooked on the work of one of today's most accomplished practitioners of detective fiction. --Otto Penzler

Hanging Valley: An Inspector Banks Novel

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Typical Robinson Mystery 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

...And by that I don't mean that typical is bad. This is a good book, just average for Robinson. It unfolds in typical manner -- a body is found, a bunch of people at the local pub are all suspects, the killer aint who you think it is... etc. Robinson patiently unfolds his stories and gives us well-developed characters. His books are a delight to read. Though not his best, this is a worthy book.

Entertaining, With a Potentially Good Set of Characters and a Good story, But Slightly Flawed 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I have read four of Robinson's Inspector Banks novels and I thought the other three were good. This present novel seems to be the worst of the four. I read the Avon 2002 paperback version (ISBN 0-380-82048-X) with the added first chapter from Strange Affair tacked on at the end as a coming attraction.

Somewhere in the middle of the 300 pages - and after a very slow start - you get the feeling that there is too much filler here. The book slows down in the middle and it has many irrelevant tourist comments about Toronto including a trip to a Jays versus Yankees baseball game. Where are we? How is that at all interesting and pertinent to a murder in the Yorkshire Dales? It seems like a lot of filler writing and it ruins the novel. Also, the first 100 pages are slow and it takes a while for the novel to get going.

Without giving away the plot, the story is about a series of murders in the small town of Swainshead village in Yorkshire. It involves inspector Banks, and two fellow detectives, along with a cast of interesting characters - with great potential for a good novel. Unfortunately, Robinson does little with these characters except for Katie Greenock, a young and attractive but slightly mentally handicapped or immature and lost young woman. It is too bad that a few of the other characters could not have been developed a little more such as he does with Katie: Robinson does a good job with her, but the other characters are little more than names and brief descriptions.

The author Robinson no longer lives in Britain. He lives in Toronto and he insists on writing part of the story about a one week trip by Banks to Toronto to interview a missing woman. The woman had lived in Swainshead at the time of an early murder. That trip to Toronto seems to break the flow of the novel.

If Robinson could have had more emphasis on the characters and Yorkshire, this could have been an excellent novel. As it is it is just average and one feels slightly disappointed with the way Robinson has written the novel.

By the way, I recently discovered Henning Mankell who writes similar novels. He writes about a fictional Swedish detective Kurt Wallander. Those are more upbeat and entertaining novels. Of the eight in that series, I recommend One Step Behind or his first Wallander novel: Faceless Killers.

The Hanging Valley: 3 or 4 stars.

Editorial Review:

Visitors have been drawn to the beauty and serenity of the Yorkshire countryside. Some never leave -- like the hiker whose decomposing corpse is discovered in a wooded valley outside the tiny village of Swainshead. It is the second such homicide to plague the region in recent years, and it is pulling investigating Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks into a dangerous mire of dark pasts, local power, and private shames. Because a shocking truth and a cold-blooded killer are waiting there ... and Banks is determined to walk into the valley of death to expose them both.

Strange Affair

Peter Robinson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Without a doubt, the family and friends of fictional sleuths are two of the most endangered species on the planet. Crime novelists seem to have no qualms about sacrificing the people nearest and dearest to their protagonists, if doing so will advance plot development or bestow emotional depth upon their series stars. Peter Robinson continues this ruthless tradition in Strange Affair, his tension-packed 15th novel featuring headstrong British Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks. Still on the mend after the blazing finale of 2004's Playing with Fire, temporarily sworn off whiskey but back to smoking, Banks is interrupted in the midst of brooding over his life and failed relationships by a message from his estranged younger brother, Roy, who says he needs the DCI's help in "a matter of life and death." Concerned, especially since Roy boasts a history of dubious business dealings, Banks leaves Yorkshire for his sibling's home in London, only to find that residence unlocked, Roy's computer missing, and his cell phone left behind. After learning that Roy was last seen stepping into a car with an unidentified man, and receiving on Roy's mobile what appears to be a photo of his only brother slumped over in a chair, the cop fears that a kidnapping has occurred.

Meanwhile, back in Eastvale, Banks's colleague and ex-lover, Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot, probes the shooting death of Jennifer Clewes, a 27-year-old family planning center administrator from London who's been found in her car, with the address of Banks's once-ruined (and recently broken into) cottage tucked into her jeans pocket. As Annie seeks to identify Clewes's attacker and determine whether this crime fits a pattern of roadway assaults, she's anxious also to discover what connection Banks may have to the case. But the DCI is frustratingly nowhere to be found.

Like 2003's Close to Home, Strange Affair adds some welcome bricks to Banks's back story, this time forcing him to reappraise a brother whom he had long resented and distrusted. Simultaneously, Robinson's latest police procedural delivers artfully contrived, intersecting story lines charged with rumors of international arms dealing, hints of misdeeds at a women's clinic, secondary players so shady they might be invisible after sundown, and insights into just how far Banks's career has distanced him from folks less steeped in the ugly side of mankind. An immensely satisfying mystery, filled with professional risks and personal regrets, this is truly an Affair to remember. --J. Kingston Pierce