Book Review – Watching the dark by Peter Robinson

I’ll be up front about my views – I was disappointed by the last two Inspector Banks books, which felt to me that Robinson had just run out of steam and was struggling to come up with something new.  I’d kind of decided that I wasn’t going to bother with Banks any more, but having read and enjoyed Before the Poison, I decided to give this one a go.

Banks starts out investigating the murder of a police officer and soon finds a link to the murdered officer’s old case of a girl that went missing in Tallinn years before.  Annie Cabbot is back after her recuperation and the cast is joined by the Icy Blonde Inspector Joanna Passero and a couple of new but dopey detectives Lombard and Hague.  Banks and Passero decamp to Tallinn to chase down information from the old case, while Cabbot draws the short straw, staying in Eastvale to sort out the English end of the case.  Banks of course tracks down the vital clue that solves the missing person case in Tallin, even though it’s not the case he’s been assigned to.

The plot’s well developed and pulls you along, with clever twists and turns.  I loved the scenes in Tallinn, having had a brilliant holiday there recently and recognised a number of the sights.  On the not so positive side, I felt that the characters weren’t quite up to scratch.  Lombard and Hague are pretty two dimensional, even though they only have bit parts, but more importantly Passero feels like an add in or a character that’s had a rewrite but still doesn’t quite fit properly.  Bits of behaviour don’t ring true either, for example Bank’s offhand comment about Passero when she’s first introduced – it felt stereotyped, rather than well characterised behaviour.

So…it’s a book I enjoyed and thought was much better than the last two Banks books.  I’ll definitely keep Banks on my target reading list, but I will be looking for better, as I think there’s still scope for improvement.

Roman crime blogger