Standing in the Shadows by Peter Robinson - Review

 

You may know that I love the DCI Banks books and have done for years. I think I've read most of them, but I haven't read many of the later ones because I've just got out of the habit of them. I was really saddened when Peter Robinson died though because it meant there would be no more books! I had been meaning to get around to reading this, the last one, because I feel like I owed it to the author and the character! My mum has read all of them and she recommended this, so I finally got round to it. I requested it at the library and when it came it was the large print version - does this mean I'm officially old now? 

In a way it is really sad that this is the last one because I would have liked to see Banks retire and take up a life of whiskey and listening to vinyl all the time, having served his time and more and having had a good career. Plus, Annie Cabot is barely in this book because in previous ones her dad Ray has died and she is taking some time off. I am not totally up to date on what has happened there, but it's briefly explained in this book. But it would have been nice to have Annie back working on Banks' last case. It's not Peter's fault, of course! I just feel sad about it!

This book has two different strands of story, which of course are going to cross over but the reader doesn't find out how until just towards the end of the book. The first strand is set in the early 1980s, in Leeds. Nick is a student at the university and his ex girlfriend, Alice, is found killed. They had split up after six months together and she had started to go out with a man called Mark when she was killed. The body has been found near where a victim of the Yorkshire Ripper was found just a few weeks previously, and at first police think the murder may be the work of the Ripper. They interview Nick but soon discover there's no way he could be the Ripper, but they still consider whether he killed Alice or not. Nick himself suspects Mark, but Mark has completely disappeared. Nick lives in a big house that has been split into bedsits, and Alice lived in the top floor flat. Her parents come to get her stuff and invite Nick to the funeral. Mostly he is upset, and also wants to work out what happened to Alice. This strand of story is really evocative of the early 80s around Leeds University and the fear around the murders that the Yorkshire Ripper did. 

Meanwhile, an archaeologist finds a body in a field near the A1. The field belongs to a farm which has been bought in order for the road to be widened and for a new shopping centre to be built. First, though, archaeologists are digging on the off chance that there are Roman remains nearby. This body, though, is nowhere near as old as that. The police are called in. They reckon the body was dumped around 2016, and is that of a sixty year old man. The police are drawing total blanks, but they are interested when they discover that the owner of the farm is an ex copper. 

There's also stuff which was quite current at round about the time that Peter must have been writing this book, which was about the undercover cops who had relationships with people under false pretences. It's really interesting and very topical and I liked the way it all came out at the end.

In all I'm giving this four out of five because I really liked it and enjoyed being back in Eastvale with Banks and co. 

Children of the Revolution by Peter Robinson - Review

When we were on holiday at the beginning of November I scrolled soooo far in my Kindle app on my tablet. I don't use my tablet for anything else except the Kindle app - not Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook or any of that. It's not the best tablet in the world, but it works fine as a Kindle. And while I don't buy many books via Amazon anymore, I've been using a Kindle since 2011 so I have loads of books on there.

I was scrolling trying to decide what I wanted to read. I ended up deleting quite a few books that I'd either started and given up on or that I didn't want to read anymore. It was a good clean up session! Anyway I came across this Peter Robinson book that I think I bought back in 2014. I needed something a bit easy to read like that, so started it.

I have read a lot of the DCI Banks books and I love that they're set in North Yorkshire. I found them years and years ago and got both my parents into them - which proves how long ago it was because my dad died in 2008. My mum recently, a year or just over, decided she would read all the Banks books in order. She's been enjoying them and I know she's read this one. I don't read them very often because they're kind of formulaic, but I thought I would as this one was just sat on my Kindle.

In this book, a sixty year old man is found dead near his home, near a disused railway line. He's been thrown from a footbridge in a scuffle, but there's five thousand pounds in his pocket, so he wasn't robbed. He has lived a hermit's life since being fired from his teaching post at the local college four years ago. No one seems to have had much of a grudge against him, but the police have to investigate and end up going back over the man's life to his university days and some time he spent in North America.

I liked the story and wanted to know what had happened to poor Gavin. I do like DCI Banks as a character, and I also like Annie and Winsome, part of his team, although I didn't think there was enough from either of their points of view in this book. I would give it a decent rating, it kept me gripped enough.

However, I did have a few problems with the book. The timelines, for one thing. It's supposed to be set in around the year that it was published, so around 2013/2014. But that means Banks has been in Eastvale since around 1988, and he was in his forties then, so he must surely be over the age for retirement now. And that's one of the points in the book - that he is nearing sixty (so those maths don't add up) and could be needing to retire soon. I get that it's difficult to end a series like this, but the time discrepancies are just annoying me by now.

Banks is offered the chance to gain promotion to superintendent, as long as he behaves himself and plays by the rules. Which of course, he doesn't. In fact, some people complain about him, and while I get that they're making trouble, it won't make his superiors feel any better about him.

Then there's a whole thing about why Gavin was fired from teaching - he was accused of sexual harassment by two students. The way that these young women and another are treated is pretty bad. The whole book seems to be rolling its eyes at the movement towards calling out sexual aggressors, and is trying to say that there are millions of false accusations - which isn't true. It seems obvious to me that the author is from a certain generation and was peeking through just a bit too much.

Then there's a bit where Annie and Gerry have a spat, and it was so ridiculously written I just laughed. It was not how women would really behave towards each other, I don't think, especially when they both work in a man's world like the police. It was ludicrous. And in the same vein, at the very end of the book Banks takes out a young woman that he met through the case. She is thirty six and beautiful - at one point he's ogling a picture of her in a bikini - and she for some reason agrees to a date with a man old enough to be her dad. This often happens throughout the series and it is just getting ridiculous now. It makes Banks come off like a sordid old man, and I don't like it.

This book was written in 2013, at which point all the above were already ridiculous and outdated ideas, and I'm just... A little bit past them now.

We'll see whether I read another Banks book. We'll see!

When the Music's Over by Peter Robinson - Review

This might be a really strange review and I really apolgise for that if it is. I've just finished this book after it's been dragging on for over a week. It really wasn't grabbing me and unfortunately I think it will be the last of the DCI Banks books that I'll read.

I've read probably most of them now. I got into them years ago, probably around fifteen years ago when I was an older teenager. My dad was really into crime novels and I often picked them up from him. I think though that I found Peter Robinson first. The books are set in Eastvale in North Yorkshire, which I think is supposed to be Skipton, and concern Alan Banks, who, at the beginning of the series, has just moved to Yorkshire from London and is dealing with being a more provinical copper than the lights of the big city. Banks is a really likeable character - he is somewhat of a maverick cop, but they all are in books aren't they - and he likes music and Laphroaig whiskey and has a string of girlfriends who are all interesting people. His partner, DI Annie Cabbot, is also likeable, although less so in this novel, I have to say. Plus I really like the setting of North Yorkshire, somewhere I really love and know quite well. I feel like Peter Robinson creates a good sense of the town, of Banks' place within it, and of the atmosphere of the countryside. So I've read a lot of the series, mostly picked up in charity shops for a couple of quid and shared with each of my parents - my dad when he was still alive, and my mum even now. 

So when I saw that this one, published last year, was on Kindle for £1.89, I bought it. I started reading it just a couple of weeks later and while I liked the story I feel like Robinson just hasn't managed to keep the stories modern enough for me. I'll go into that in a bit. 

In this book there are two cases going on. Banks is tasked with investigating an historic allegation of sexual assault. Linda Palmer is just fourteen at the time, in 1967, and on holiday in Blackpool when she meets TV personality Danny Caxton. She's eager to impress him and goes back to his hotel room, where she's raped by Caxton and another man. She and her mother report it back at home in Leeds, but the case is quickly dropped. In the modern time, she has been inspired by cases like the Jimmy Savile one and has reported the crime again. It is part of a bigger investigation into Caxton, who is now eighty five. 

Meanwhile, a girl is found murdered on a quiet road near Eastvale. She has been raped, but by different men to the person who murdered her. Identifying her leads Annie to Wytherton, a place on the edge of Teesside, where racial tensions are running high. Banks has to oversee both cases and deal with press intrusion into both too.

I liked both stories and I felt that both were done quite well. Annie's attitude towards immigrants was, I felt, quite out of character to me, no matter how often she tried to say that she just wanted to catch the bad guys, no mater what race they were. I really went off her in this book. I also felt like there were some writing issues with the teenagers involved. Even though the novel is set in about the current year (they keep saying the rape of Linda Palmer happened "about fifty years ago"), no one thinks to check the social media accounts of the teenagers involved. For real, there's not one mention of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or anything like that. I honestly believe that if you've just got the identity of a fifteen year old girl, you're going to check her social media to see who she's been hanging around with recently. And yet, nobody does. Furthermore, some of the names given to the teens are strange - one is called Carol Fisher. I don't know about you, but I think kids born around the turn of the century don't tend to be called Carol. They're called things like Amelia and Jade and Caitlin. I feel like Robinson could have done some research in naming his characters.

Even more furthermore, there's a part where one of the police officers goes to talk to a teenager about what's happened, in secret. This teenager does not speak like a current teenager. Not even the most articulate teenager would have used some of the phrases that she did, which sounded archaic even to my own eyes. I wish Robinson had done a bit more research into this, too. He should read some Young Adult to get a feel for how to write convincing teenagers!

I was talking to my partner as I was reading this book. He always asks whether I'm enjoying what I'm reading and I usually don't have much to say, but this time I told him I wasn't really enjoying it, because of the issues above. That made me think a bit more about the series as a whole. I think the problem is that Robinson didn't expect that he would be writing them for so long. The first book was published thirty years ago and at the time, Banks isn't a young man. He's been in the Metropolitan Police for a while, and in the first books his children are teenagers. He's around forty at the very least. Thirty years on, as a copper, he'd have been retired for fifteen years and would be mowing the lawn in his retirement. But clearly the books took off (there's a TV show, too) and now it's 30 years later and the books haven't caught up to life, but neither is there any attempt to set them in the past. It is a problem, and it's really offputting, so I think I'm done with Banks unfortunately. I give this book three out of five.