Review by Booklist Review
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.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Apr.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.