The Summer That Never Was

Geoff Cragg is a tenured instructor in the Faculty of General Studies at
the University of Calgary in Alberta.

In this 13th mystery featuring detective Alan Banks, Peter Robinson
demonstrates his mastery of his own unique approach to the English
police procedural crime novel. The Summer That Never Was has all the
elements that fans have come to expect of Robinson: a complex plot,
sympathetic and developed characters, an atmospheric Yorkshire setting,
and careful but not obsessive attention to the actual work of the
police.

The story opens with Banks cutting short his vacation when he reads
that a recently unearthed skeleton has been positively identified as
that of Graham Marshall, Banks’s best friend at school, who vanished
one Sunday morning while delivering papers. On his return, Banks faces
an eerily similar situation in the disappearance of a gifted but lonely
teenage boy who fails to return home one afternoon from school. While
heading the investigation of the recent disappearance, Banks is also
drawn into the Marshall case—for a time as a suspect—and is forced
to confront his memories of the past in order to arrive at a solution to
the 40-year old mystery of a schoolboy’s murder.

The interplay of the two murders is fascinating, but it is through his
development of Banks’s character that Robinson deepens the novel and
sets it apart from some of the earlier ones in the series. In comparison
to the younger, happily married, and rather conventional Alan Banks, the
man we meet at the beginning of this book is unsettled, facing a
divorce, without a relationship, ambivalent about his family, and unsure
even if he should continue in his profession. As the series has
progressed, and emphatically so in The Summer That Never Was, Banks has
become a more complex and interesting character.