Innocent Graves (Inspector Banks Novels, 8)

This book is more than just a finely crafted mystery story. Robinson delves into the human psyche with this book, and we see what circumstances can do to an ordinary man in his Owen Pierce character. Pierce is arrested for the murder of a young girl in a graveyard, and we see what his charging and sentencing and his time in prison do to him. Banks is not convinced that he is the killer though even though the forensic evidence is strong. This is a haunting tale that stays with you long after you close the book. It is a tragedy of a life lost and a life wasted. When the actual murderer is caught the motive and situation is so tawdry that even the usually unflappable Banks feels great sadness. I am really getting to like CI Banks, and look forward to more about him and the unusual cases that he comes across.

Peter Robinson grew up in Yorkshire, and is the author of a number of previous novels featuring Inspector Banks. He is the winner of numerous awards in the United States, Britain and Canada, and in 2002 he won the CWA Dagger in the Library. As I also come from Leeds the background to his stories is something that I have experienced first hand and because of this I have a special affection for his books. However they would be first class crime fiction wherever they were based. Having said that I can understand to a degree why some readers may not like the books. Banks is a character that has grown over several books and the author is very comfortable not only with the character of Banks, but all the other character too. To me this makes the stories flow because the author instinctively knows how his characters are going to react in certain situations. The books are produced as a series and it is nice if you can read them all in the order they were written, but this is by no means compulsory as each book stands alone. They are what I would call `light' reading. By that I mean that they flow and not that they are third rate in any sense, in fact quite the opposite. As murders go the strangling of a teenage girls with the strap of her own school satchel was nothing out of the ordinary for Inspector Banks. It just seemed that much more brutal in a quiet Yorkshire village than it would have done on the streets of central London where human beings didn't seem to care too much what they did to one another. Deborah Harrison had been found in the local church yard one foggy night, but she was no ordinary sixteen-year-old, her father was an extremely powerful man who mixed in the highest orders of industry, defence and information of a classified nature. Even poor Deborah seemed to have her own secrets.

Well, here's the 8th Banks novel in which a teenage pupil at the posh local private girls' school is found strangled in a graveyard. Suspicion alights on a Croatian refugee, Ive Jelacic; but while Banks is busy investigating that and other leads, his colleagues DI Barry Stott and DS Jim Hatchley get on the scent of a suspicious stranger spotted in a nearby pub and a nearby restaurant around the time of the crime. They are soon led to Owen Pierce, a local college lecturer, and very soon Pierce finds himself arrested and charged with murder. This books stands out among the Banks novels so far in the prominence it allows to a secondary character. So much so that Pierce, the character in question, isn't really secondary at all but becomes very much the centre of the book to at lest as great a degree as does Banks. And it's s much a courtroom drama as a detective story, a long and very effective section of the narrative being taken up with Pierce's trial, a section during which Banks himself fades into the background. Compared to its predecessors in the Banks series I thought it about the best so far and a significant raising of his game on the part of Robinson: dark and clever and very gripping.

This novel takes life seriously and asks the reader to examine some of his beliefs and assumptions about the world and existence. Unlike almost every crime novel (Thomas Cook and M. Connelly excluded)I read, this story has depth and "meat on its bones." For example we see how the police and the justice system can drive an innocent party to commit a heinous crime, which was only committed because the police were so eager to bring someone, anyone to trial. Also, we meet several very real lpeople, struggling to make it in life. Robinson pulls no punches in his gritty (often ugly) depiction of police officers and the squalid atmosphere of a police station for someone accused of a crime. Robinson pulls few punches in this story. Two problems, one major: 1)Minor: The parents of the murdered girl simply disappear from the novel--they needed a fuller role as the novel progressed; 2)Major problem: Main character, Banks, is flat and boring. His responses to what is going on around him almost make me think that he is clinically depressed, but Robinson doesn't give the reader any help in understanding the "major" character in the novel. Also, I assume the author wants us to think that Banks is an intelligent detective, but his willingness to acquiesce in the quick arrest of a suspect based on rather flimsy evidence and the zealousness of a clearly neurotic (obsessive) officer under his command makes this reader think that Banks is both apathetic (doesn't care who is arrested)and a poor detective.

This is the first book I have read from Robinson, and the only thing I regret is not finding this book sooner! This is an awesome novel by the extremely talented and humble Robinson. I must say, I truly enjoyed it for all it is worth. It is so deep, interesting, intelligant and inquesitive murder mystery. Never have I read a book that was so formally thought out. When you think you know who the killer is, there is always a twist and find myself questioning just how Peter Robinson will get himself put out of this theory, it alsmost seems impossible, but he always does. What guy. Pick up his books and read it people, honestly.