Standing in the Shadows
A Novel
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4.2 • 126 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"One of the finest police procedural writers around... [Standing in the Shadows] is as narratively rich and surprising as Robinson's best work. Knowing it's his last makes the reading bittersweet." — New York Times Book Review
The 28th twisting installment in the DCI Alan Banks mystery series that Stephen King calls “the best now on the market.”
In November 1980, Nick Hartley returns home from a university lecture to find his house crawling with police. His ex-girlfriend, Alice Poole, has been found murdered, and her new boyfriend Mark Woodcroft is missing. Nick is the prime suspect. The case quickly goes cold, but Nick cannot let it go. He embarks on a career in investigative journalism, determined to find Alice’s murderer—but his obsession leads him down a dangerous path.
Decades later, in November 2019, an archaeologist unearths a skeleton that turns out to be far more contemporary than the Roman remains she is seeking. Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his team are called in to investigate, but there is little to be gleaned from the remains themselves. Left with few clues, Banks and his team must rely on their wits to hunt down a killer.
As the two cases unfurl, the investigations twist and turn to an explosive conclusion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Robinson's excellent 28th novel featuring Det. Supt. Alan Banks (after 2021's Not Dark Yet) interweaves the 1980 murder of college student Alice Poole with the discovery in 2019 of a man's body buried in an old farm about to be razed for a shopping center in Eastvale, Yorkshire. The earlier crime is related through the eyes of Poole's ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Hartley, who's haunted by the fact that no one was charged with Poole's murder—and the obvious suspect, her then boyfriend, Mark Woodcroft, who disappeared without a trace. The narrative alternates between Hartley's lifelong interest in the case while he becomes a successful journalist and Banks leading his team, including Det. Sgt. Winsome Jackman and other regulars, in the dogged, needle-in-a-haystack search for the identity of the man buried on the farm and, ultimately, his killer. The story enables Robinson to delve deeply into Banks's backstory, including a stint undercover in London early in his career, along with policing and corruption from Thatcherite England to the present. As always in the Banks novels, readers will enjoy the details of pop culture and social history. This is an intelligent and satisfying procedural.
Customer Reviews
I'll miss Alan Banks and his team
Not Peter Robinson's best--too convoluted with an irritatingly smug and uninteresting lead character, but I'm sorry to see the last of the Eastvale crew. RIP Peter Robinson.