The DCI Alan Banks novels written by Peter Robinson are a new obsession of mine; they are set in North Yorkshire in the fictional town of Eastdale and tell the travails of DCI Banks, a man in his Fifties who is divorced, intelligent, opera loving but with an edgier quality than the ubiquitous Morse. As with all DCI Banks novels we start with the discovery of the body, only this time the novel begins in 1969 where a young girl is found in a sleeping bag at a rock concert. The girl had been stabbed and stuffed in the bag, the concert was the first in Yorkshire and the investigation is headed by a DCI Chadwick who is a WW2 veteran and rather straight-laced. Jump ...  Read the complete review

Having started reading Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks books rather late, only a few years ago, I have nearly caught up. The books, their contents and the evolution of the characters is a far cry from the very first book, Gallow's View, published in the 80s and featuring no mod cons at all. In fact, it was a peeping tom case as opposed to the subsequent murder cases that Banks has been solving. Now in the mid-Noughties, the books have evolved characters around Banks enough to give them some free rein, and this is exactly what Robinson does in Piece of My Heart. The book actually starts in 1969 at Brimleigh Festival in Yorkshire, where the body of a young girl ...  Read the complete review