It’s nearly 8pm on Monday night of the Victoria Day weekend, and I’m feeling a bit tired and cranky and not really in the mood to write this post. But I also don’t want to leave it until next weekend, as there’s no guarantee I’ll be feeling any different by then! (it’s been a long school year so far, and I’m not the only one looking forward to the summer break!)
I finished reading the last book in the “DCI Alan Banks” series by Peter Robinson yesterday. Standing in the Shadows was just published, but was finished before the author’s death in October. Robinson has long been one of my favourite British mystery authors, and it was with a sense of melancholy that I read this final installment. This novel weaves together an unsolved murder in the early 1980s with a skeleton found on an old farm in 2019. The murdered woman, Alice Poole, was a student who got mixed up with some political activists, and her ex-boyfriend, Nick, suspects that her new boyfriend had something to do with it, but at the height of the search for the Yorkshire Ripper, her murder investigation seems to fall through the cracks. In 2019, an old farm is being dug up and developed into a new shopping centre, but the local university’s archeology department has first dibs at digging for Roman artifacts. What no one expected is that one of the archeologists would discover a skeleton, and DCI Banks’ team is called in to investigate. Are these two cases linked, and if so, how? Well, of course they’re linked, since they are in the same novel, but the uncertainty of how keeps this novel moving forward steadily through chapters alternating between time periods and narrators. It was a good, solid mystery, not one of Robinson’s best, but still a page-turner that does not disappoint.
That’s all for tonight. Happy Victoria Day!
Bye for now…Julie
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