Piece of My Heart: An Inspector Banks Novel

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

In 1969, the body of a young woman is found in the detritus of an
outdoor rock concert; Detective Inspector Stanley Chadwick is on the
case. In 2005, the body of a music journalist is found in a rented
cottage; Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is on the case. In this
16th Inspector Banks novel, Peter Robinson gives us two homicide
investigations in dissimilar eras, where police methods, scientific
tools, and social attitudes are quite different. Only near the novel’s
end do the two cases clearly connect.

No one writes procedurals better than Peter Robinson, whose work has
won major awards in Europe and North America. The procedural is a genre
of criminous literature that concentrates on the gritty, realistic,
day-to-day slog of the police detectives through long hours in the field
and the laboratory, interviewing, checking alibis, comparing notes with
colleagues, sometimes blundering into dead ends. The reader learns only
what the police learn, and the well-paced revelations and surprises keep
us eagerly turning the pages. In addition, Robinson portrays the
rivalries and ambitions of office politics, which can be as nasty in a
police department as in any corporation. Above all, he has created
characters we have come to care about, and who develop from novel to
novel. In this book, Banks’s relationship with Detective Inspector
Annie Cabbot, which went badly off the rails in Playing with Fire, is
back on track, and Banks is adjusting to his son’s rock music
lifestyle and to a new home while enjoying a legacy left him when his
only brother was murdered in Strange Affair. Which is to say that this
superlative series is best read from the beginning.