Bad boy

With very little fanfare, the nineteenth book in the DCI Banks series, "Bad boy", was published a week ago. Amazon had been plugging it for only three weeks before its publishing date so the gap between knowing about the book's existence and reading it was fairly short.

Most of Peter Robinson's books tend to start slowly and build up steam as they progress, and this book is no exception to that rule. In fact, this one started so slowly that it took almost half the book before its pace became more than leisurely. Contributing to this is the fact that DCI Banks is on holiday in San Francisco when the story begins and there is a great deal of development before he returns to Eastvale.

In Banks' absence, most of the story (until his return) is told through the eyes of his colleague DI Annie Cabbot. She has been the third party limited narrator in previous books but has always had to 'share the stage' with Banks. Here the first hundred or so pages come from her point of view, and when the book does switch to another character's pov, it is that of Tracy Banks (DCI Banks' daughter, who until now has been a peripheral character - more mentioned than actually present - in most of the books).

This book is not a classical police procedural; there is no murder to be solved, but the book does present much more police procedure than one normally gets in a novel. Judging by the acknowledgments at the end of the book, author Robinson got most of this material directly from the real police. As such, this is not another in the regular Banks series, where Banks has to outwit someone who committed a murder at the beginning of the book. Instead this is a less cerebral and more action focused story - which does not centre around Banks (at least, not until the end).

In my one read through of the book (which probably was taken at a faster pace than I will take in the future), I didn't notice any glaring mistakes. In previous books, I've found a few; the first time I pointed the mistake out to author Robinson, but as he notes on his website,

By the time a book goes to press, it has been read by about twenty people, many of them professionals in the book business, and still mistakes slip through. They always will. It’s human nature. You might think you’re the first person to notice that Banks’s eyes are blue on page 53 and grey on page 314, but you’re probably not. And sometimes these gentle admonishments come at quite the wrong moment. When you’re having a difficult time with the book you’re writing, the last thing you want is some smart Alec telling you there’s something wrong with your last book!

In 'Strange Affair', Annie Cabbott eats meat after having been a strict vegetarian in all the books; in another, Banks leaves a hotel room without turning off the television, but when he returns, he turns it back on (maybe the maid turned it off in his absence). Rereading "Innocent graves" a week ago, I found a very subtle error in which the location of an interview is given wrongly. But as I say, 'Bad boy' doesn't seem to have such an error.

This is similar to continuity problems in films: very rarely is the viewer aware of such problems as she is too caught up in the story to notice, but watching the film at a slower pace will often reveal a multitude of errors.

I assume that Robinson has reached the limit of the traditional police procedural and is now extending his range, utilising the same cast of characters but on solving problems other than murder. As such, his actions are to be applauded - because otherwise it would be very hard to explain the high murder rate of Eastvale, a fictitious setting for what was once a small town and now seems to have grown to alarming proportions.

Unlike other of his novels, this book didn't touch a nerve in context of its background material, for example  "Piece of the heart" or "Close to home" (aka "The summer that never was"). As such, it becomes an exciting read but not a novel from which my life might be enriched, or cause me to think about similar events which might have occurred in my life.

Looking at the other reviews currently at Amazon, they all say that this is Robinson's worst book in the series. Whilst it is far from being the best, it is also different from the others (a fact which I tried to point out two paragraphs earlier) and as such should not necessarily be compared to the others. At least it has a definite storyline with a beginning, a middle and an end, which is more than the previous 'experimental novel', "All the colours of darkness", had.