Before the Poison

Bring back Alan Banks!  As a regular reader of Peter Robinson's book, I feel as if I know Alan Banks personally.   He's a typical detective, somewhat cranky, sometimes morose, a maverick who never endears himself to his superiors, but solves cases his own way.

Sadly, Alan Banks is absent from Before the Poison,  I can imagine Robinson might be tired of Banks.  After all, he has a steady diet of the character, while we readers only bump into him once in a while.  However, while Robinson might be tired of Banks, I wasn't.

I wonder if Robinson is caving in to the current fascination with spirits, by having his main protagonist, Chris Lowndes, a recent widower, experience sightings of a ghost in the isolated house he has rented in northern England.  Robinson always has lots of references to music in his books, and in this one there's lots of music, as Lowndes is a composer.

This is a pretty good book, but not nearly as good as previous Robinson works.

Bad Boy

I love mystery novels set in Britain.  Even when they're written by a Canadian.  Well, Peter Robinson was born in England and spends half of each year in Yorkshire, but he is now a Canadian.  I've loved reading about his Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks: his keen detective skills, his irreverent attitude to police rules that get in the way of detecting, and his many romances with interesting women. 

In Bad Boy,  with Banks away on a holiday in the US, his partner, Annie Cabbot takes a report from a distraught woman that results in an assault from an armed response team.  Events quickly spiral out of control, putting Banks' daughter Tracy at risk at the centre of the case.  Banks has everything at stake, as he works desperately to uncoil the threads of this case.

As usual, Robinson delivers great suspense, encompassed in smooth prose.  Recommended for some of your light summer reading.