Sleeping in the Ground

July 10, 2017
The mass shooting of a wedding party outside a Yorkshire church propels bestseller Robinson’s intriguing but slow-burning 24th novel featuring Det. Supt. Alan Banks (after 2016’s When the Music’s Over). In the aftermath, three people are dead, including the bride, and two more later succumb to their wounds. Banks bristles a bit when his boss brings in a profiler, especially when he discovers that it’s forensic psychologist Jenny Fuller, for whom he used to hold a torch. Together, Fuller, Banks, and Banks’s lead detective, Det. Sgt. Annie Cabbot, try to paint a picture of the gunman, but even when they come up with a credible suspect, the discovery only leads to a maze of further possibilities, including motives that have their start decades earlier in connection to another crime. The reader may feel that Banks is too much on the periphery, dealing with the loss of a long-ago lover, as the complex story unfolds around him, but he’s still a mighty force to be reckoned with in crime fiction. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary.

James Langton's performance of the latest Inspector Banks mystery nicely colors the audiobook's wide range of characters and keeps the pace moving at the right clip--important for a story that starts with a shooting death at a wedding. With the police not knowing if the killer is done or just beginning a murder spree, all forces are mobilized, including a former love interest of Banks. (He swears that there was nothing to their relationship, but you know how that is.) As is usual with the Banks series, the plot blends cops' personal lives with detailed police procedure for a realistic result. Langton's engaged narration lifts us above Robinson's habit of describing character via music playlists and keeps us hooked into the action until the end. A.C.S. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

August 1, 2017

DSI Alan Banks and his team are assigned to investigate a mass murder at a wedding in the Yorkshire Dales. Despite a successful manhunt, Banks suspects more is going on. Gripping suspense and Robinson's adroit plotting make this 24th book in the series a must-read for police procedural fans who also enjoy works by Deborah Crombie, Ian Rankin, and Elizabeth George. [See Prepub Alert, 2/20/17.]--ACT

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2017
DS Alan Banks is snapped out of mourning his long-ago first love by a particularly nasty murder spree that interrupts the nuptials at St. Mary's Church.Murder waits on no copper, and Banks (When the Music's Over, 2016, etc.) must put aside his grief over Emily Hargreaves' loss to cancer as he seeks the person who's opened fire on the wedding party of Laura Tindall and Benjamin Kemp. The gunman, equipped with an AR15, kills the bride, her maid of honor, and the father of the groom outright; their wounds neglected by protocols that keep medical personnel from the scene until an armed response team can secure it, the groom and another bridesmaid soon succumb as well, raising the toll to five dead and four wounded, one of them DS Winsome Jackman. A providential witness supplies enough information to send Banks and DI Annie Cabbot, whose father, bohemian artist Ray Cabbot, is crashing with Banks while he looks for new digs, to retired dentist Martin Edgeworth, who seems to tick every box for the shooter--owning an AR15, driving a black RAV4, belonging to a gun club, and shot to death himself. But pathologist Dr. Glendenning's warning that Edgeworth's obvious suicide may actually be murder sends the investigation back to square one, with one additional caveat: the killer is no temperamental hothead but someone who's clearly been planning this massacre for a long time. The usual patient, thorough investigation takes a predictable turn awry when rookie DC Geraldine Masterson ignores Banks' orders and confronts the killer in the hope of saving still another victim--a confrontation whose outcome Robinson's willingness to kill off cast members like Emily Hargreaves leaves in serious doubt. Robinson's interrogations, many of them conducted in pubs, have the rare quality of steadily illuminating and thickening both the speakers and their subjects. The result is a slow-burning intensity that deepens from beginning to end.

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August 1, 2017
A wedding in a picture-perfect church in the Yorkshire Dales is ripped apart by an assault rifle, resulting in five people shot to death, including the bride. In the twenty-fourth Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks mystery, Robinson brings to bear his considerable knowledge of police procedure. But this is no bloodless investigation; Robinson is adept at showing the emotional toll of working on a case in which one cop witnessed the horror, another was wounded, and most of the victims, being locals, were known to Banks and his team. A criminal profiler (one of Banks' former loves) returns from Australia; her insights into the personality of the rampage killer (the most likely type to have committed the crime) hold the investigation together and are fascinating in and of themselves. Ratcheting up the tension is the question of whether this killer may strike again. As usual with Robinson, deft plotting is slowed down a bit by Banks' musings. Robinson has won a clutch of awards, including the Edgar, the Dagger in the Library Award (UK), and Sweden's Martin Beck Award.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)