Standing in the Shadows

November 1, 2022

Blockbuster Baldacci takes a break with Simply Lies, forsaking his various series for the moment to write a stand-alone (a million-copy first printing). In Where Are the Children Now? Burke springboards from the Higgins Clark classic Where Are the Children? as a grown-up Missy and Mike rely on what they learned during their own childhood abduction to rescue Missy's snatched stepdaughter. In Graham's Shadow of Death, Amy Larson of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and FBI special agent Hunter Forrest head to Denver to find the lethal doomsday cult they tracked through Danger in Numbers and Crimson Summer. In Robert Ludlum's The Treadstone Rendition, Hood brings back Adam Hayes, who rushes in to help former partner Abdul Nassir and his family, who are terrified of both the Taliban and the rogue CIA contractors gone violent as the United States withdraws from Afghanistan. Mary Pat Fennessey's teenage daughter goes missing and a young Black man is struck and killed by a subway train on the same steamy night in 1974 Boston, and there are no Small Mercies as Mary Pat's hunt for Jules riles the Irish mob; following Lehane's multi-best-booked Since We Fell (150,000-copy first printing). Two cold cases are Standing in the Shadows in this latest from Edgar and CWA Dagger in the Library honoree Robinson; in 1980, Nick Hartley is suspected of killing his ex-girlfriend and spends a lifetime seeking the killer, while in 2019 a modern-day skeleton found at an archaeological dig keeps Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his Yorkshire team busy. In Sandford's Dark Angel, Lucas Davenport's adopted daughter Letty poses as a rogue programmer for hire to help the Department of Homeland Security forestall the takeover of Minneapolis's power grid by some ominous hackers. While facing down angry competitors when he moves to the West Coast and its City of Dreams, young, widowed mob underboss Danny Ryan visits the set of a movie depicting his crew's involvement in the New England crime war and encounters the actress playing his late wife; following Winslow's New York Times best-selling series launcher, City on Fire (250,000-copy first printing).

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February 1, 2023
An archaeological dig at an ancient Roman site in Britain unearths parts of a skeleton, but the remains are disturbingly contemporary. In this, the twenty-eighth in the Detective Chief Inspector Banks series, the dig quickly becomes a crime scene, and Banks' team from the Yorkshire Constabulary joins forces with archaeology specialists to solve a baffling cold case. Readers will love getting a fascinating primer in both modern forensics and archaeological techniques. The narrative is also a clever two-for-one, jumping back and forth between the story of a jilted university student in 1980, whose girlfriend was found murdered, making him a prime suspect, and the work of DCI Banks and his team to identify the Roman ruins interloper and the killer who buried the body. As usual, Banks' steadfast, multifaceted character holds his team and the story itself together, though the myriad domestic details (such as Banks' music collection) are sometimes overdone. The ending, in which the two narratives join, is a stunner.

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Starred review from February 20, 2023
Bestseller Robinson’s excellent 28th novel featuring Det. Supt. Alan Banks (after 2021’s Not Dark Yet) interweaves the 1980 murder of college student Alice Poole with the discovery in 2019 of a man’s body buried in an old farm about to be razed for a shopping center in Eastvale, Yorkshire. The earlier crime is related through the eyes of Poole’s ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Hartley, who’s haunted by the fact that no one was charged with Poole’s murder—and the obvious suspect, her then boyfriend, Mark Woodcroft, who disappeared without a trace. The narrative alternates between Hartley’s lifelong interest in the case while he becomes a successful journalist and Banks leading his team, including Det. Sgt. Winsome Jackman and other regulars, in the dogged, needle-in-a-haystack search for the identity of the man buried on the farm and, ultimately, his killer. The story enables Robinson to delve deeply into Banks’s backstory, including a stint undercover in London early in his career, along with policing and corruption from Thatcherite England to the present. As always in the Banks novels, readers will enjoy the details of pop culture and social history. This is an intelligent and satisfying procedural. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary.

March 1, 2023
An unexpected discovery sends Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his Eastvale crew back to investigate a murder that may or may not have involved the Yorkshire Ripper's last victim back in 1980. Combing a parcel of land marked as the site of a new shopping mall for evidence of Roman ruins, archaeologist Grace Hutchinson finds some decidedly more recent remains: the skeleton of a man killed only four or five years ago. The roots of the unknown victim's death go back even further to the murder of Leeds University senior Alice Poole, a political activist who was killed only a few weeks after the Ripper claimed his last known victim. Was she another casualty of the Ripper, or was her killer someone closer to her? Her schoolmate, downstairs neighbor, and ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Hartley, who comes under suspicion from investigating officers DI Stuart Glassco and DC Christopher Marley in 1980, himself suspects Mark Woodcroft, the lover who replaced him before going AWOL, perhaps to Paris. Back in 2019, Banks, along with DS Winsome Jackman and a group of forensic techs, struggles to identify the anonymous victim. Harold Gillespie, who owned the site of Grace Hutchinson's discovery at the time of the burial, naturally professes to know nothing about the dead man and points out that he would hardly have buried a man he killed on his own property. But the news that Gillespie is himself a retired police officer leads to a chain of further discoveries. Robinson, who died last October, zigzags deftly back and forth between present and past en route to an anticlimactic solution and a truly devastating last sentence. Not the best of Robinson's many Yorkshire mysteries but one of the most heartfelt.

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