Friday, January 19, 2007

Piece of My Heart by Peter Robinson

Inspector Banks is back, this time investigating a murder that takes him all the way back to the glory days of a sixties rock band called the Mad Hatters. As Banks struggles to determine who killed a rock journalist staying in a remote Yorkshire village, and why, Robinson takes us on flashbacks to another murder investigation 35 years earlier, showing the experiences of DI Stanley Chadwick as he hunts for the murderer of a beautiful young girl killed at an outdoor rock festival.

The storytelling here is flawless; I found I was sucked into both stories, and was just as keen to read about Chadwick as about the more familiar Inspector Banks. It took quite a while for the two stories to finally "connect", so part of the mystery was trying to figure out how they were related to each other aside from one really obvious way. This was an enjoyable novel which I would have liked to read much more quickly, if I'd only had time. I thought the ending was a little bit weak; it can be very hard to wrap up a crime novel effectively, though, so I'm trying not to be picky.

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