In A Dry Season
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4.3 • 17 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Widely acclaimed as Robinson's best and most ambitious novel, In a Dry Season—the tenth book in the internationally bestselling Inspector Banks series—takes the series to chilling new heights.
During a blistering summer, drought has depleted the Reservoir, revealing the ruins of Hobb's End, the small Yorkshire village that lay at its bottom. When a boy finds a skeleton buried in the ruins, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks faces the daunting challenge of identifying the victim—a woman who lived in a place that no longer exists, whose neighbours have scattered to the winds . . . and whose killer has escaped detection for half a century.
With the help of Detective Sergeant Annie Cabbot, Banks uncovers long-kept secrets in a community that has resolutely concealed its past. As they unravel the deceptive and desperate relationships of a half-century ago, suspense heightens, and the past finally bursts into the present with terrifying consequences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anyone who loves a good mystery should curl up gratefully with a cuppa to enjoy this rich 10th installment of the acclaimed British police procedural series. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, on the skids since the breakup with wife Sandra, languishes in "career Siberia" until old nemesis Chief Constable Riddle sends him to remotest Yorkshire on a "dirty, pointless, dead-end case." It seems a local kid has discovered a skeleton in dried-up Thornfield Reservoir, constructed on the site of the deserted bucolic village of Hobb's End. Banks taps into his familiar network of colleagues to identify the skeleton as that of Gloria Shackleton, a gorgeous, provocative "land girl" who worked on a Hobb's End farm while her husband was off fighting the Japanese decades ago. Apparently, Gloria had been stabbed to death. As Banks and Detective Sergeant Annie Cabbot struggle to re-create the 50-year-old crime scene, wartime Yorkshire, with all its deprivations and depravities, springs to life. (Banks revives, too, showing renewed interest in his job, and in women.) Robinson brilliantly interweaves the story of Banks's investigation with an ambiguous manuscript by detective novelist "Vivian Elmsley," a 70-ish woman once Gloria's sister-in-law. Is the manuscript a memoir of events leading to Gloria's vicious murder, or "all just a story"? Either way, every detail rings true. Once again, Robinson's work stands out for its psychological and moral complexity, its startling evocation of pastoral England and its gritty, compassionate portrayal of modern sleuthing.
