murder

BONFIRE . . . between the covers

I promise to ration the use of metaphors based on fire and sparks, but you must allow me to say that there is an explosive start to this novel. New to the historic Sussex town of Lewes, DCI Holly Hennessy’s first major job is to head the team policing the town’s anarchic bonfire festival. It is held every November but its origins are slightly older than those of the Guy Fawkes festivities. In the reign of Queen ‘Bloody’ Mary, seventeen protestants were burned at the stake, and it was in their memory – and with a more general sense of anti Catholicism – that the ritual developed. Effigies of figures of authority are now regularly burned as part of the fun.

On this particular evening events take an horrific turn when a burning barrel is rolled down a hill, to crash against the base of the town war memorial. Inside the barrel is a human body, which turns out to be that of Lily Taylor, a university student who made a tidy income from her online skill as a gamer girl. Events become more complex for Hennessy when she realises that in the crowd watching the spectacle, and working on a documentary film, is Kyra Ford, an academic at The University of Sussex and someone she went to school with. They parted on extremely bad terms, and the exact reasons for that schism are revealed later. This revelation casts a very different light on Holly’s relationship with husband Ian and stepson Joe.

A quick heads up. This novel deals with subjects which some readers may find uncomfortable. We read of sexual exploitation of teenage girls and the famous eight words from the last line of Two Loves by Lord Alfred Douglas. Both are pivotal go the narrative, but if you are troubled by their inclusion then, as they used to say, “look away now”.

In Lewes there are different – and rival – Bonfire societies, one of which is The Pelham. We meet Natasha Ferdinand, vineyard owner and self-styled Wiccan. She was once a senior member of The Pelham Society but, like Kyra and Holly, they have fallen out in dramatic fashion. Coincidentally (or perhaps not) Lily’s stepfather Phil Dean is a member of The Pelham Society. Via one of her students, Kyra discovers that Lily’s gamer persona had a rather different side to it. She was also to be seen on the adult channel OnlyCams and may have even been groomed by her tutor Dr Ambrose Woolf.

CCTV footage emerges that shows a ceremonially masked man in a pub full of revellers. He meets Lily, appears to slip something into her drink and, when the drug takes effect a little while later, he ‘helps’ her from the pub. Woolf is brought in for questioning, but is not detained. The next day, he is found dead in his house. It is a grim scene that Holly sees.

“In the weak oyster light, she takes in his ashen, lifeless face. Pulling back the duvet to reveal the rest of his body, she sees the deep slit on his right wrist and the shallower slash on his left. He’s wearing nothing but a pair of soiled y-fronts and his body is marble white. The lean torso and stomach so hairless he looks almost polished.”

Iona Hepburn is an ICU doctor who has worked in Lewes, taught at Sussex University, and now lives in Brighton with her wife and daughter. She likens her medical career to that of police detectives in their shared sense of humanity and over-familiarity with death. Bonfire has an unusual subtext for a mainstream crime novel, but it works. There is drama a-plenty, human passion, and a wry take on modern values.The narrative is immersive and totally convincing. It is Iona Hepburn’s debut novel, and it will be published by Allison and Busby on 22nd October.

October 18, 2026 0

THE HARLOT OF ST CECELIA’S . . . Between the covers

England, 1923. Eden Brior is a librarian at a London institution called St Cecelia’s, and a long way from home, even though her native Boston was at that time perhaps, the most English of American cities. Through no fault of her own, she becomes involved in the investigation into a particularly horrid murder, that of a beautiful – but damaged – French actress. The dead woman is Isabelle Jalbert, someone whose physical beauty has caused those around her – both men and women – an exquisite blend of pain and joy.

Her current husband (although we learn that she is guilty of bigamy) is an American theatre producer called Alan Holloway, although we have already been told that Isabelle has considerable ‘history’ with an apparently feckless and reckless man called Simon Cross who lives with his sister Meg and her husband Arthur in a London suburb.

I have been fascinated by The Great War since I was a teenager, have walked countless miles across the former battlefields, and I am drawn instinctively to novels set in the 1920s and 1930s. At the forefront of my mind is always a variant of the question, “What did you do in the war, Daddy?” Simon Cross is certainly of an age to have served, as is Inspector Garrett. In fact, Simon Cross served in France as a Captain in the East Surreys, and was awarded the Military Cross but, as he tells Garrett, “After The Somme, they just gave them to anyone who was left.” Two days after The Armistice, Cross simply disappeared in Paris, was eventually found, court marshaled and dishonorably discharged. Garrett also did his bit, but with the London Irish in Palestine, and he has a leg disfigured by Turkish shells and bullets to prove it.

While Cross lives with his sister and her rather pompous husband, Garrett rents a room in a noisy and inhospitable house. The owner sells up, and our man has to seek accommodation elsewhere. Cross is the enigma. He is apparently louche, decadent, and idle, but Garrett discovers he secretly trains as a sprinter. We also discover that his post war Paris days were spent in the company of both Isabelle and a mysterious painter called Marc Etienne, now in the later stages of morphine addiction, a habit he shared with Isabelle.

At the root of the mystery, I suppose, is the question of money. Simon Cross appears to have no income, yet he lives the high life of gentlemen’s clubs and expensive taxis. The pompous Arthur Drake is a university lecturer, but he and Meg can afford a chauffeur and a maid. Isabelle was supposed to be on the verge of a family bequest, and Alan Holloway, like many theatre producers, is almost permanently broke.

Eden Brior flits in and out of the narrative. She is certainly not a conventional heroine. She seems dowdy and frequently flustered, although intelligent and observant. In the end, she identifies the killer of Isabelle at about the same time as Garrett, but for different reasons.

Darcy Graves (below) grew up in Boston and holds an MA in English history. She brings to her work a deep love of the Golden Age of detective fiction — particularly Agatha Christie and P.D. James — and the whimsy of P.G. Wodehouse.

There is, at the end of the Kindle version of the book, a set of readers’ discussion questions, presumably aimed at groups that like to talk about books and their interpretation. One of the questions is about the title. Ms Graves asks, “Who, or what, do you think the title ultimately points toward?“Good question. For all her faults, Isabelle Jalbert was only briefly acquainted with St Cecelia’s and, if we take the ‘H’ word to mean a prostitute, then Eden’s morals seem to be unblemished. Perhaps, then, it is a ‘what’, and there is some metaphor hidden here. Obviously, this book is a pastiche, but it is delightfully done, with a genuine sense of awareness for the brittle and uncertain times that followed The Great War. It is independently published, and available now.

October 5, 2026 0

COLD BLADE . . . Between the covers

We are in the streets – some decidedly mean but others rather splendid – of Minneapolis for this pacy thriller, the latest saga in the career of private investigator Nils Shapiro who works in an agency with two other PIs, Annika and Eglaand. Lukas Day, a junior hedge fund manager has been found in his apartment, butchered with a kitchen knife. The chief suspect is the woman who was recently in his bed, Paige Willett. Who just happens to be the wife of Day’s boss.

Jonathan Willett is a hugely successful hedge fund trader, and has made billions by being ruthless, uncompromising and determined to win at every single aspect of his life. Willett hires Shapiro to find out who killed Lukas Day. Shapiro soon finds that both Jonathan and Paige have what is euphemistically known as an open marriage and are fairly repulsive human beings, for different reasons, but being an old fashioned kind of man, he determines to get to the truth, unhindered by his negative feelings for his clients.

The initial alternative suspects are all friends and family; we have Reeves Fleetwood, Willett’s former business partner and now serious competitor; we have Willett’s first wife Cecilia, and their son Vincent, who has mental issues; the there’s Benjamin, Willett’s brother, tasked withe unenviable task of looking after their father, now in the grip of dementia; how about Brooke Stolle, Lukas Day’s actual girlfriend?

CriFi buffs will find Shapiro doesn’t depart too far from the well traveled and much loved template for an American PI. He is handsome, smart, a former police officer and, while he doesn’t wisecrack with other characters, he does share his trenchant observations with readers. He is both unlucky and unfortunate in love. He is divorced from his first wife, and his second – a senior Minneapolis police officer, died of wounds sustained in a shoot-out three years earlier.

Jonathan Willett has a mania for antiques and, in particular Chinese artifacts including ancient porcelain. The trio at the Stone Arch Investigations, now joined by a former British police officer Shanae, come up with a possible theory. For all Willett’s acquisitive energy, it seems like the main kick he gets from buying the antiques is the knowledge that if he has them, no-one else can. The actual grace, history and intrinsic beauty of the vases and and sculptures appears to escape him, and he is quite happy to have them stored away in a cellar. What if, then, Benjamin Willett – a talented potter – has been ‘borrowing’ vases from his brother’s house, making detailed copies of them, returning the copies to the house, but selling on the originals? Already in Shapiro’s sights is a mysterious warehouse on the edge of town, a place with intense 24/7 security, and apparently run by an elderly Chinese man known as Mr Tu (who is, as they say, ‘known’ to the FBI). In the end the killer of Lukas Day is unmasked, and all I will say is that the murderer’s identity is a surprise – but not a shock. This entertaining and immersive thriller is published by Severn House Crime and Thriller and is available now.

October 5, 2026 0

KILLING ON THE NORFOLK BROADS . . . Between the covers

I have come to enjoy Heather Peck’s Greg Geldard mysteries, and you can read reviews of earlier novels in the series by clicking this link. Yes, Geldard is just one of scores of fictional English coppers vying for our attention as CriFi readers, but the books are well written and the main characters are totally convincing. There is probably a PhD out there somewhere analysing fictional murder locations within the English counties but, quite unscientifically, I suggest that Norfolk would be high on the list. In addition to the Geldard series we have, in no particular order, the Peter Shaw novels of Jim Kelly, the Ruth Galloway mysteries by Elly Griffiths and the recently re-published DS David Smith storied by Peter Grainger.

For the avoidance of doubt, this book may have a rural setting but cosy crime it most certainly is not. Inquisitive old ladies, bumbling vicars and bucolic police constables are noticeable by their absence. Instead we have the skeleton of a woman discovered in an abandoned farmhouse. She is roped to a chair and has been dead for, perhaps, three years. Nearby is a cupboard full of sex toys and, in an adjacent bedroom, there are walk to wall mirrors. Geldard believes this is the stage setting for a snuff movie. His forensic advisors believe that the skull, found beside the chair, was severed while the victim was still alive.

The dead woman is eventually identified as that of a Ukranian film student who somehow found her way into the darker fringes of that particular art form. Diligent investigative work reveals a currently live victim of these perverted film-makers. She is located, and is found on a leaky semi-abandoned cabin cruiser hidden away on an isolated spur of one of the Norfolk Broads.

Here’s what may seem to be an odd analogy. I used to be an enthusiastic angler, and our fishing reels had a kind of clutch which, when playing a big fish, allowed a certain amount of line to be paid out, tiring the fish, but smoothly enough not to cause a line snap. So it is here. Geldard and his team have their quarry hooked, but reeling in their prey requires subtlety, patience and determination. With enquiries ranging from North London HMOs to villages in Ukraine ravaged by the Chernobyl disaster, the purveyors of this most despicable of entertainments are brought to justice.

One of the many joys of this book is that Heather Peck avoids narrative tricks which, in my opinion, disfigure too many modern crime novels. There are no flashbacks, no flash-forwards, and none of the ‘six weeks earlier’ chapters which I have come to know and hate. What we have here is terrific storytelling, intelligent writing, and a thoroughly immersive read. I was particularly delighted that the rather happy ending was graced by someone singing The Parting Glass, an evocative old Scottish song which, in younger days, I sang many times. Killing On The Norfolk Broads will be published by Joffe Books on 22nd September.

September 21, 2026 0

SECRETS ON THE FELLS . . . Between the covers

Whatever sights the silent stones of Fountains Abbey had witnessed over the centuries from its creation by the Normans to its ruination by Henry VIII, a butchered corpse was probably not among their number. But when Yorkshire cops Di Leo Donovan and DC Shan Young are called out to the stately ruins one bitter winter night, that is just what they find. Patrick Armitage, college lecturer, his body ravaged by knife wounds, his lips frozen in the rictus of death, had been on site earlier, directing the dress rehearsal of a musical.

Now, with all the actors, singers and technicians long gone, he lies dead, with the arterial spray from his wounds staining one of the ancient pillars of the nave. Donovan and Young are an interesting pair. Donovan, much Young’s senior, is beginning to feel the onset of arthritis, but has other pains, the principle one being that of the shattered relationship with Luke, his son, who is doing prison time for a hate crime, brought to light by his father’s diligence. Young is of Chinese heritage with adoptive parents, and is in a same sex relationship. She and her partner have one failed IVF pregnancy behind them, but they hope for better things.

As is often the way with police procedurals, early suspects seem to be eliminated for one reason or another, and the investigation stalls. Donovan likens the process to one of those fairground grab machines where the prize seems almost in reach before the claws slip and close on thin air. In murder fiction, families are rarely what they seem to be, and so it is here. Armitage’s brother Max is a drunk, obsessed with pursuing an ever-more-elusive fortune by dabbling in crypto currency. And is Bree, Armitage’s wife, the distraught widow she seems to be?

The investigation takes a dramatic turn when a teenage girl, Rosie, one of the stars of the now abandoned musical goes missing. Donovan and Young have discovered that some years earlier, Armitage had been involved, apparently innocently, with a female student, Janelle, who had developed a huge crush on him. Is the disappearance of Rosie history repeating itself? Did the charismatic – and handsome – college lecturer somehow fall foul of yet another teenage obsession?

In some ways, this novel is nothing out of the ordinary in the genre, in that the procedural details are convincing, and the main characters are well drawn. For me, however, the stand-out quality is the vibrancy of the setting; the towering and gaunt majesty of the ruined abbey, the sharp frosts making the tall grasses sparkle on the wintry lanes, and the sheer endurance of the local limestone in the old farms and field walls. Against this backdrop, Cath Staincliffe has written a crime novel which involves readers from the very first paragraph and keeps us guessing until the very end.

I don’t use the star system on my site for the reason that it is too blunt a tool, and I prefer to convey my views with more nuance. Commercial sites like Amazon, Netgalley and Goodreads do have the star system, and I generally play safe and award three or four. Here, though, I will be going for five. In addition to the wonderful topographical background, Cath Staincliffe mines deep into human joy and sorrow. Donovan’s heartbreak at the total breakdown of his the relationship with his son, Young’s paralysing anxiety over her own identity and the health of her adoptive father, and the devastating effects of violent crime on families – each is described unflinchingly, but with a huge sense of compassion. Secrets On The Fells is published by Joffe Books and available now.

September 17, 2026 0

SURFACE . . . Between the covers

Norek’s powerful and unflinching account of the Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä, The Winter Warriors, was graphic and brutal, so I was not expecting a gentle pastoral stroll, but when I opened Surface, his latest novel, the words were devastating. Noémie Chastain, a Paris cop, has led a dawn raid on the apartment of a ruthless drug dealer. And she takes a shotgun blast. Right in the face. The damage is not fatal, but it is ruinous.

She recovers in hospital but when she returns to work a month later, she finds that her bosses have decided that her shattered face is too potent a reminder to her colleagues of how vulnerable they are, and she is sent to France’s deep south, the Aveyron Department, ostensibly to work with the local police force in the commune of Avalone but, she is told, secretly to observe how inefficient they are and prepare a report recommending reorganisation.

Francophile that I am, this book taught me something of which I had been previously unaware, and that is the difference between French police and the Gendarmerie. The latter is a military organisation in both training and practice, while the police, typified in fiction by the immortal Jules Maigret, is regarded as a civilian unit. The Gendarmerie’s main responsibility is for rural areas, and here they will take over if the Avalone police department is disbanded.

With her report recommending this on a memory stick ready to send to Paris, Noémie receives an early morning visit from the amiable and sensitive Lieutenant Romain Valant. Human remains have been found, tightly sealed in an oil drum, floating in a local lake. All of a sudden, everything changes for Noémie. Twenty five years earlier, three children, two boys and a girl, had disappeared, and she puts her report on the police department to one side, and resolves to solve the case of the missing children.

The lake is man made, created for a hydro electric project and beneath its surface is every fiction writer’s dream trope – a ruined and abandoned village.The remains in the barrel are identified as those of one of three missing children, who vanished just before the old village drowned beneath the dark waters. A diving team is sent for and, in a truly terrifying passage, the senior diver discovers another barrel, lodged in the ruins of the old community centre.

Unwilling to risk any more lives Noémie persuades the regional préfet to issue orders to drain the lake. Whatever secrets surround the three missing children, it becomes slowly clear that they are to be found not in the fate of the career criminal, a violent drifter called Fortin, who disappeared without trace after being linked to the case, but closer to home, in Avalone itself. First, part of the farm belonging to Roman Valant’s father, the long-time Mayor of the commune, is destroyed in an arson attack, and then Noémie and her borrowed Land Rover are shunted of the parapet of the dam by a mysterious white van. She escapes with cuts and bruises, and is able to complete the most macabre strand of her investigation. She has learned that all the coffins from the old village were disinterred before the deluge, and reburied in the new cemetery on dry land.

It is another well-used CriFi trope that the best place to bury a missing body is in a cemetery and, with the help of the small-but-willing team of local officers, she determines that there is one grave too many. Who – or what – will it contain? The answer adds only more mystery to the case but then, in a brilliant plot twist Noémie, is summoned to a village a few hours’ drive away, just over the Spanish border and, in an instant, the case is turned on its head. By this time, the lake has been drained, and old Avalone has surrendered yet another grisly secret. There is one final devastating twist before Noémie closes the case and exorcises Avalone’s ghosts.

I always wonder, when reading novels in translation, just how much of the original intent is conveyed, and how accurately. All I can say is that if Nick Caistor has come anywhere near Olivier Norek’s original narrative, then he has done a brilliant job. This is one of the most original, inventive, gripping – and truly compassionate – novels I have read in many a year. Surface is published by Open Borders Press and is available now.

September 5, 2026 0

THE FATAL END . . . Between the covers

The seam of the autistic investigator, for long deeply buried has been fruitfully mined in recent times. Tim Sullivan’s DS George Cross is perhaps the prime example, and there is also Washington Poe’s sidekick Tilly Bradshaw, but now AJ Cross wields her pick and introduces forensic scientist Professor Teigan Craft. She is incisive, brilliant and perceptive, but the world of conversational nuance, metaphor and allusion is as remote to her as the surface of The Red Planet.
In crime novels, such characters need police partners, and here we have DCI Steve Thompson, a good officer, but currently distracted by his failing marriage.Together, they investigate the disappearance of Riley McCarthy, a nurse with the cardiac surgery unit at the local hospital. Her body is subsequently found in the burnt-out shell of her car.
As a teenager, Riley had been awarded substantial damages after being hit by a rogue driver. She banked the money, but when Thompson and Craft serve a warrant on her bank, they see that she withdrew every penny just days before she disappeared. The pair smell a particularly malodorous rodent, but Riley’s. colleagues on the cardiac unit remain tight lipped. Was Riley ‘just’ a competent and empathetic nurse and good at her job, or is there a personal relationship hidden beneath the terse answers to the questions?
Senior surgeon Charles Fredericks is a deeply unpleasant individual, controlling and narcissistic, but is he a killer? And does senior nurse Elspeth Goren harbour some kind of grudge that would have ended in murder? Teigan ‘Tig’ Craft is much more socially aware than George Cross or Tilly Bradshaw. She has a partner, Tom, and so the sexual side of her nature is addressed. Also, she has a growing library of conversational metaphors and what they actually mean.
A person of interest at the hospital where Riley worked is HR director, George Appleby. When he is discovered dead, having apparently thrown himself from a high window, the mystery deepens. Some crime novelists set us on a journey, and the road may be long, but there are no diversions or unexpected turnings. I’ll stay with the road metaphor, because AJ Cross takes us down a byroad, and the metaphor becomes literal. Years earlier, anaesthetist Matthew Weaver’s world was plunged into chaos when his wife and daughter were killed in an inexplicable road accident near Bristol. The police were unable to trace the driver of the Transit van that nudged Penny Weaver’s car off the slip road to its destruction at the bottom of a ravine.
In the end the death of Penny Weaver and her daughter is just one piece of the jigsaw that Craft and Thompson complete to bring a surprising killer to justice. The Fatal End is immersive and cleverly written, and full of the the authentic detail that AJ Cross, herself a forensic psychologist brings to the narrative. It is published by Joffe Books and available now.

September 1, 2026 0

DEATH ON THE PIER . . . Between the covers

I hadn’t read a Pauline Rowson novel for years, but remembered that she is well known for her love of mysteries set in coastal locations. Here, in Death on the Pier, we are in a 1951 England with a recent war won, but with most ordinary people still struggling to support the costly yoke imposed by being, at least nominally, victors. Everyone, including the Metropolitan Police’s Detective Inspector Alun Ryga, still carries ration books. He is sent on an undercover mission to what was then ‘East End on Sea’, the brash resort of Southend.

A retired naval officer has found a bloodstained corpse in a municipal shrubbery. He goes to seek help and returns with a police constable, but there is no body, nor any sign that one was ever there. Is Clive Cottinglea a fraud, deluded, or part of some wider conspiracy? Posing as a tourist, Ryga befriends Cottinglea and senses that many things are not adding up. When Cottinglea is found dead in his deckchair on Southend’s celebrated pier, to quote our most celebrated crime writer, “the game is afoot.”

The dead man was clearly short of money, and his claims of being a veteran of the Battle of Jutland and skipper of one of Dunkirk’s heroic small boats have not convinced people at the local yacht club. When Ryga, literally over Cottinglea’s dead body, is forced to reveal that he is a London copper, Pauline Rowson has set the stage for a fascinating mystery.

The plot becomes deliciously complex. As Ryga waits for the post mortem to reveal just how Cottinglea died, the truth about the man’s real life is laid bare. As for being a Commander, the only people he ever commanded were a few housemaids and cooks. Cottinglea was a butler at a nearby stately home, and had been for some years. When, just months earlier, the Lady of The Manor had finally given up the struggle of maintaining Tyide Hall and recreating its 1920s halcyon days, Cottinglea had been paid off and given a decent reference, while the noble Lady sold the house and grounds to developers and flew off to America with the proceeds.

Cottinglea had enjoyed a brief but uncomfortable few days as a guest member of the local yacht club, but why had he been signed in by senior member Admiral Burnham? And why is Burnham now missing?

On one level, this is a standard murder mystery, albeit a very good one, but there is much more. Through the perceptive gaze of Ryga, Pauline Rowson gives us moving and compassionate portraits of ordinary people fighting an uneven battle against life’s vicissitudes.There is Miss Bard, the seemingly severe landlady of The Marigolds guest house. Once a bright and attractive woman, she is now an ageing spinster, saddled with debt but maintaining a brave face. Her carpets and furnishings are shabby, but scrupulously clean, and all that remains to her of a former better life are good manners and a sense of decency. Then there is Mrs Burnham, terminally Ill and virtually deserted by her husband who lacks the moral courage to cope with her illness face to face. Again, she remembers better times, but faces what is left of her future with quiet dignity.

We are also allowed to be observers of a very different England from the place we inhabit today. We meet men and women who, in one way or another, helped ‘win the war’. But what did they win? From individual workers, shopkeepers, pensioners and public servants right up to those who hold the government purse strings, there is a sense that, to quote Derek Raymond, the crust is on its uppers. I cannot claim to remember 1951, as I was just four years old then, but the legacy of those post-war years was a defining part of my later childhood.

Of course, Ryga gets to the bottom of the mystery, and we are presented with a very entertaining – if rather involved – solution. Above all, the book has a profound sense of social history and empathy with flawed but all-too-human characters, and this makes it memorable. Readers were introduced to Alun Ryga in Death In The Cove (2023) and this, the sixth in the series, will be published by Joffe Books on 26th August.

August 26, 2026 0

PAST TIMES – OLD CRIMES . . . The Summer That Never Was

Yes, I know, I am cheating here. My PT-OC limit was supposed to be 2000, but I am making an exception here. After all, what is three years in a lifetime? In the lovely song Just A Song At Twilight, there is a phrase, “Once in the dear dead days beyond recall..”. I had those days, and back then, before publishers and authors trusted me with free copies of their novels, I was an inveterate user of our local public library. I mostly borrowed crime fiction, and I came to love the books of writers like Phil Rickman, Nick Oldham, Jonathan Kellerman, Jim Kelly and Peter Robinson. I quote another memorable song, “Some are dead and some are living..” and, sadly, Peter Robinson is one of the latter.

He is best remembered for his Inspector Banks novels, and I have chosen one of those for this feature. Banks, of course, does his coppering in the Yorkshire Dales, but this story takes him back to his childhood in Peterborough. Peterborough is, in some ways, a strange place. It has a majestic cathedral, was once in Northamptonshire, but now seems to be in Cambridgeshire. Like Banks in the novel, I remember it in the 1960s, when it was a grimy little town, surrounded by brickworks but, even then, a vital railway hub. I knew it from my days as a trainspotter, hair excessively Brylcreemed, and with a school satchel packed with sandwiches, fizzy pop and Ian Allen train books. Then came Peterborough’s designation as a New Town, with the massive expansion turning it into a kind of Milton Keynes, all roundabouts and fancifully named new housing estates.

Strangely, there is nothing in online information to suggest that Robinson was a youngster in Peterborough (he was born and brought up in Leeds) but then novelists make us believe things that actually never happened – that’s what they are good at. Here, Robinson creates a brilliant counterpoint, like two independent melodies dancing along together in perfect harmony, Banks, of course, is the link.

Down in Peterborough, a skeleton is discovered on a building site. It is that of a childhood friend of Banks, who disappeared when he was a teenager. Graham Marshall disappeared one morning while doing his paper round and, despite an extensive police investigation, no trace of him was ever found. Back in the present day, Banks’s offsider and onetime lover, Annie Cabbot is investigating the disappearance of Luke Armitage, a brooding and rather troubled youngster with celebrity parents. After what appears to be a fake kidnap-ransom demand, his body is found in a moorland tarn.

For Banks, with the aid of a resourceful Peterborough copper Michelle Hart, the solution to Graham Marshall’s murder involves a painful dismantling of what he remembers of an innocent friendship. The death of Luke Armitage involves individuals who, while innocent of malice, are certainly guilty of several of the Deadly Sins.

Banks, in his determination to secure justice for both boys, comes to realise that the boundaries between victim and perpetrator, between law guardian and law breaker can sometimes be blurred almost into indistinction. Faulkner said, in his memorable line from Requiem For A Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” and here, Banks’s return to the unremarkable Peterborough housing estate of his youth brings about not only the warmth of nostalgia brought about by the magazines and pop songs of his teenage years, but something darker and much more discomforting. I was haunted by the book when I first read it, not least because it chimed so perfectly with my recollections of pre New Town Peterborough, a city of hard graft, amazing LNER engines, and its no-nonsense terraced streets. I would propose that this novel, first published in 2003, is Peter Robinson’s masterpiece.