The Hanging Valley--A Novel of Suspense

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.

The title makes THE HANGING VALLEY sound like a Western, but James Langton's broad Yorkshire accents make it clear there are no cowboys here. When a mutilated body is discovered by a hiker in the titular valley, Inspector Banks, formerly of London, must identify the victim. He works with the gruff-voiced Superintendent Gristhorpe, questioning witnesses, including a brutal innkeeper and his traumatized wife. Langton gives most of the women feathery voices, but Katie is made to sound so fragile as to be debilitated. Banks travels to Canada to search for a potential witness, but the voices heard there bear little resemblance to those of actual Canadians. B.V.M. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine