The Hanging Valley
A compulsive police suspense featuring Inspector Banks
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- €6.99
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
The Hanging Valley is the fourth novel in Peter Robinson's bestselling Inspector Banks series.
TWO MURDERS. A MISSING PERSON. A VILLAGE WITH A TERRIBLE SECRET.
A faceless corpse is found in a tranquil, hidden valley below the village of Swainshead, the victim’s identity deliberately obscured. And when Chief Inspector Alan Banks arrives, he finds that no-one is willing to talk. Banks's frustration only grows when he suspects his latest case might be connected with an unsolved murder and a missing local woman, which occurred in the same area five years ago.
Among the silent suspects are the Collier brothers, the wealthiest and most powerful family in the area. When they start using their influence to slow down the investigation, Banks finds himself in a race against time . . .
The Hanging Valley is followed by Past Reason Hated in the Inspector Banks series.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A rotting corpse in the Yorkshire Dales brings Chief Inspector Alan Banks to the insular village of Swainshead in the latest of Robinson's ( Gallows View ) justly acclaimed series of procedurals. Aided by a receipt found in the trousers pocket of the murder victim, Banks identifies him as Bernard Allen, a local youth on a visit home from Canada. The investigation leads back five years to the unsolved murder of a PI hunting for a young girl's killer and the nearly simultaneous disappearance of a village woman. Evoking Ruth Rendell's Wexford setting and, like her, posing multiple solutions before the story's closing, Robinson lets Banks do much of his deducing with a pint glass in his hand--here inviting comparisons with Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse. Watching Banks down his beer is the pool of likeliest suspects, including two landowner brothers with sinister pasts, a pretentious B&B owner and his sexually repressed wife. Banks travels to Canada (on the trail of the missing woman) and moves through a maze of passion and possible blackmail before finding the solution in long-kept secrets. Robinson excels in the depiction of character, especially in his portrait of his pleasingly fallible copper. He is steadily ascending toward the pinnacles of crime fiction.
