All the Colours of Darkness
by Peter Robinson
Hodder HK$91
One thing Britain does better and more prolifically than almost all other countries is the police procedural. It seems hardly a day goes by without Ian Rankin, Mark Billingham, Ian Harvey or Colin Dexter publishing a book, normally starring a hard-drinking detective who listens to rock music and refuses to obey orders. Peter Robinson is as good as any of the above. If you haven't heard of him, All the Colours of Darkness is a good place to start. True, it marks Robinson's 21st year of writing stories about DCI Alan Banks. But he is good enough to make even a newcomer feel at home. Here, when a man named Mark Hardcastle is found hanging in a Yorkshire wood, everyone suspects suicide, including Banks' partner, DI Annie Cabot. When Hardcastle's boyfriend Laurence Silbert is found murdered shortly thereafter, everyone suspects that Hardcastle was to blame - everyone, that is, except Banks. The DCI slowly discovers that Silbert led a double existence, one that draws our hero into what a writer fond of clich?s might call the murky world of international espionage. Robinson, by contrast, elegantly evades any sort of clich?. Discover him at once.