DSupt Banks: Not dark yet

The usual time for a new Peter Robinson/DCI Banks book to be published is in the summer, but the summer of 2020 went by with no new book - not really surprising, considering the year 2020. But wait! A new book did appear yesterday, creeping onto the stage with little publicity - "Not dark yet", the 27th installment of the series.

The book is named after a Bob Dylan song, to which DS Banks listens at one stage, thus maintaining the tradition of naming books after songs, no matter how tenuous the connection.

The book became available yesterday in its Kindle edition: I had ordered it perhaps a week in advance and was mildly excited when I downloaded it.

At first, I was underwhelmed by the story; it begins with three different strands: recently added character Zelda revisits her childhood, Alan Banks sees his daughter get married, and Annie Cabbott continues investigating the background behind a murder executed (sorry for the pun!) in the previous book. None of these threads are particularly interesting, and in fact, the marriage thread runs dry immediately. It gets replaced with another short thread about Banks' son and his musical group's farewell tour.

But then an event that crops up in Annie's investigation starts to become interesting and the Zelda thread hots up ... and suddenly the book becomes much more interesting and engrossing, so much so that I continued reading all the way until the end, which is surprising, to say the least. I have often written that the pacing in these books is such that the beginning is slow and the ending fast, but this time the beginning was very slow and the ending very fast.

No glaring mistakes appeared in my first pass through the book, although there was one little thing that nagged me. Annie is looking for someone (a girl) but can only find very few traces. She manages to find the manager of a pizza restaurant where the girl had worked; not much information comes out of this interview, but the manager did say that the girl's salary was paid to her bank account. This is never referred to again, but surely Annie should have asked about this account then follow it up with the appropriate branch who could have told her that the balance was transferred to ....