โ Scribed by Robinson, Peter
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
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.
It looks like a common enough kind of crime: Outspoken young racist Jason Fox has been beaten and kicked to death in an alley on the way home from the pub where he insulted a trio of Pakistanis. But Mohammed (nโ George) Mahmood and his friends insist that as much as they disliked Jason Fox, they had nothing to do with his murder, and there's not enough evidence to hold them. So Chief Inspector Alan Banks, more and more on the outs with his wife, plunges into the case, determined to find out who the ``policemen'' were who rummaged through Fox's flat before anyone knew he was dead, and what Fox's neo-Nazi mates in the Albion League know about his death. Unfortunately, the Albion League's headquarters are in Leeds, along with the home of Banks's favorite violist, Pamela Jeffreys--and Chief Constable Jeremiah Riddle's suspicions that Banks keeps returning to Leeds only to make beautiful music together with Pamela hardens into certainty after Banks follows an anonymous tip to Amsterdam on the very weekend when his squad is extracting a confession to the killing. Suspended from his job by Jimmy Riddle, Banks will have to work under the table with Detective Susan Gay (still sadly carrying a torch for him) to prove that sometimes you ought to look a convenient confession right back in the mouth. Though the unending whirl of soap-opera romance in Banks's life can wear thin, his ninth procedural (Innocent Graves, 1996, etc.) is abrim with racial tension, patient detective work, and the hero's appealing decency. -- Copyright ยฉ1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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