In A Dry Season
The 10th novel in the number one bestselling Inspector Alan Banks crime series
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4.3 • 66 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
‘The Alan Banks mystery-suspense novels are the best series on the market. Try one and tell me I'm wrong’ – Stephen King
In A Dry Season is the tenth novel in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series, following on from Dead Right.
A lost village. Past crimes. Present evil.
During a blistering summer, drought has depleted Thornfield Reservoir, uncovering the remains of a small village called Hobb's End – hidden from view for over forty years. For a curious young boy this resurfaced hamlet is a magical playground . . . until he unearths a human skeleton.
Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is given the impossible task of identifying the victim – a woman who lived in a place that no longer exists, whose former residents are scattered to the winds. Anyone else might throw in the towel but DCI Banks is determined to uncover the murky past buried beneath a flood of time . . .
In A Dry Season is followed by the eleventh book in this Yorkshire-based crime series, Cold is the Grave.
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.
Customer Reviews
Gripping read.
The first DCI Banks novel I have read, and it absolutely won’t be the last. Couldn’t put it down.
In a Dry Season
Impulsive reading, couldn't wait to finish to find out who had done it.