Peter Robinson grew up in Yorkshire, and is the author of a number of previous novels featuring Inspector Banks. He is the winner of numerous awards in the United States, Britain and Canada, and in 2002 he won the CWA Dagger in the Library. As I also come from Leeds the background to his stories is something that I have experienced first hand and because of this I have a special affection for his books. However they would be first class crime fiction wherever they were based.
Having said that I can understand to a degree why some readers may not like the books. Banks is a character that has grown over several books and the author is very comfortable not only with the character of Banks, but all the other character too. To me this makes the stories flow because the author instinctively knows how his characters are going to react in certain situations. The books are produced as a series and it is nice if you can read them all in the order they were written, but this is by no means compulsory as each book stands alone. They are what I would call `light' reading. By that I mean that they flow and not that they are third rate in any sense, in fact quite the opposite.
This book centres around the abduction of a young girl from her mother by two people posing as social workers. It is the mother's fear of authority that to leads her to comply with their request to take the young girl away for tests. It is only when they fail to return the seven-year-old that the mother realises that she has made an awful mistake. For all those involved in the case it brings back dreadful memories of the Moors Murders. DCI Banks is also investigating a particularly gruesome murder at an abandoned mine and gradually the clues in the two cases begin to converge . . .