In a Dry Season

The village of Hobb's End was deserted almost a half-century before civil engineers transformed it into a reservoir. Now a drought has uncovered the old village, and the skeletal remains of a young woman are found where her murdered body was hidden fifty years earlier. Ron Keith reads Robinson's police procedural--which shifts between the 1940s and the 1990s--with a delightful North-country accent. It works reasonably well with Robinson's Yorkshire setting--although Keith's voice is somewhat older than what one would expect for Chief Inspector Alan Banks. But the brogue is distractingly when reading dialogue with characters from Texas or California. Nevertheless, Keith's reading is precise, melodious, and sincere, and Robinson's storytelling in this Anthony-winning novel carries the day. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

Starred review from March 29, 1999
Anyone who loves a good mystery should curl up gratefully with a cuppa to enjoy this rich 10th installment of the acclaimed British police procedural series. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, on the skids since the breakup with wife Sandra, languishes in "career Siberia" until old nemesis Chief Constable Riddle sends him to remotest Yorkshire on a "dirty, pointless, dead-end case." It seems a local kid has discovered a skeleton in dried-up Thornfield Reservoir, constructed on the site of the deserted bucolic village of Hobb's End. Banks taps into his familiar network of colleagues to identify the skeleton as that of Gloria Shackleton, a gorgeous, provocative "land girl" who worked on a Hobb's End farm while her husband was off fighting the Japanese decades ago. Apparently, Gloria had been stabbed to death. As Banks and Detective Sergeant Annie Cabbot struggle to re-create the 50-year-old crime scene, wartime Yorkshire, with all its deprivations and depravities, springs to life. (Banks revives, too, showing renewed interest in his job, and in women.) Robinson brilliantly interweaves the story of Banks's investigation with an ambiguous manuscript by detective novelist "Vivian Elmsley," a 70-ish woman once Gloria's sister-in-law. Is the manuscript a memoir of events leading to Gloria's vicious murder, or "all just a story"? Either way, every detail rings true. Once again, Robinson's work stands out for its psychological and moral complexity, its startling evocation of pastoral England and its gritty, compassionate portrayal of modern sleuthing. Agent, Dominick Abel. Author tour.