The Hanging Valley

November 30, 1992
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.

November 1, 1992
Robinson renders a happy mixture of English village procedural and Canadian atmosphere. After failing to solve the murder of a wandering hiker near a Yorkshire village, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks flies to Toronto to question a key witness. The plot still revolves around several Yorkshire suspects, including an abusive social climber, a wealthy squire, an emotionally repressed innkeeper, and a bitter ex-husband--who all seem to have some secret in common. This solid, straightforward title is recommended for most fiction collections.

Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 1992
There's been a murder in the sleepy Yorkshire village of Swainshead, and Deputy Chief Inspector Alan Banks is assigned the case. Establishing the identity of the maggot-ridden victim is easy, but to discover the events in the victim's past that led to his murder, Banks must travel from the Yorkshire dales to Oxford University and Canada. As Banks investigates further, he finds a dark and strangely disquieting side to peaceful Swainshead and its inhabitants--the wealthy and mysterious Collier brothers; macho Sam Greenock; his meek and troubled wife, Katie; Anne Ralston, Stephen Collier's former lover; and Bernie Allen, the murder victim. The first part of the book is engaging, if not especially exciting. By the middle of the story, though, the tension begins to increase, and one is tempted to read faster and faster to find out what will happen as this roller-coaster plot hurtles toward a surprising but satisfying climax. ((Reviewed Oct. 15, 1992))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1992, American Library Association.)