In a Dry Season

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

Both Detective Chief Inspector Banks and his Yorkshire Dales are having
a dry season. Banks is separated from his wife and, although he has been
reinstated with the police after a suspension, he is still “in career
Siberia.” A drought has dried up reservoirs, revealing in one of them
the ruins of a wee village flooded decades ago. When a
skeleton—probably from the 1940s—is found under the floor of one of
the newly exposed ruins, Banks is given the apparently dead-end job of
investigating. What follows is only partly a superlative police
procedural; it is also an engrossing tale of that village and its people
during Hitler’s war. That story is a novel in itself. Unfolding in
tandem, of course, is the story of Banks’s investigation, and his
personal relationships, including those with a policewoman with whom he
is assigned to work and a psychologist with whom he initially had
dealings in Gallows View (1987), the first of 10 Inspector Banks
mysteries.

In A Dry Season is a multilayered book, suspensefully plotted,
atmospherically detailed (especially in its vivid depiction of life in
wartime England), and satisfying on all accounts—even if the violent
incident that brings together the 1940s and 1990s at the climax is a bit
melodramatic. Although the dust jacket labels this book as an Inspector
Banks mystery, it is perhaps unfortunate that this fine work has been so
pigeonholed; it is much more than an exceptionally fine whodunit, and
deserves readers beyond those who confine themselves to the mystery
genre.