Gallows View - Peter Robinson

I am an avid fan of crime and detective thrillers, and even though my wife is always on the hunt for something in a different genre that I would like, she saw this book last Christmas and thought I might like it. Nearly a year on, and I am halfway throught the fifth of Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series of books, and I have loved them all so far, none more so than this one, Gallows View. The book is set in Yorkshire in the late 1980s, as we are first introduced to Inspector Alan Banks, a hot shot policeman from London who has moved up to fill a vacant post deep in the Yorkshire Dales. Robinson breaks Banks in easily for his first mystery, giving him the ...  Read the complete review

I came to this book with no expectations: I'd never heard of Peter Robinson, or of Inspector Banks, the central character. It was something I picked up on Read it Swap it ages ago and only just got round to looking at. I have to say: I was pleasantly surprised. Gallows View is one of the gentler crime/police books available. Set in a Yorkshire town, it's nice to see a police crime thriller with a distinctly British flavour, rather than the bog standard American one, set in New York or LA. Similarly, the plot sets it apart from other novels in the genre if only because it doesn't involve the hunt for a serial killer who taunts the police. Instead, it centres ...  Read the complete review