DCI Banks

The Summer That Never Was is the 13th novel in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series, following on from Aftermath. A skeleton has been unearthed. Soon the body is identified, and the horrific discovery hits the headlines. Fourteen-year-old Graham Marshall went missing during his paper round in 1965. The police found no trace of him. His disappearance left his family shattered and his best friend, Alan Banks, full of guilt.

Playing with Fire is the 14th novel in Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series, following on from The Summer That Never Was. In the early hours of a cold January morning, two narrow boats catch fire on the dead-end stretch of the Eastvale canal. When signs of accelerant are found at the scene, DCI Banks and DI Annie Cabbot are summoned. But by the time they arrive, only the smouldering wreckage is left, and human remains have been found on both boats.

In the early hours of the morning, a man reports a fire on two old canal boats. One of the firefighters notices the use of accelerant at the scene and calls the police, but by the time Inspector Banks arrives, the fire brigade have put out the flames and only the smouldering wreckage remains. A body has been found on each barge, and all the evidence points towards a deliberate arson attack.

A bullet to the brain abruptly halted a terrified young woman's desperate flight. In her pocket is the name of a policeman whose own life was brutally invaded, mercilessly shaken, and very nearly erased - a policeman who has since gone missing. The dead woman in the car had been running from something - but she didn't run far or fast enough. Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot would like to question the man the victim was apparently racing to meet: Annie's superior - and former lover - Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks.

When Alan Banks receives a disturbing message from his brother, Roy, he abandons the peaceful Yorkshire Dales for the bright lights of London to seek him out. But Roy seems to have vanished into thin air. Meanwhile, DI Annie Cabbot is called to a quiet stretch of road just outside Eastvale, where a young woman has been found dead in her car. In the victim's pocket, scribbled on a slip of paper, police discover Banks' name and address.

One morning in March, on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, a woman named Karen Drew is found in her wheelchair with her throat slit. Back in Eastvale on that same morning, in a tangle of narrow alleys behind a market square, the body of Hayley Daniels is found raped and strangled. Two towns...two murders....

Once on the investigation of a murder case involving a costume designer and his older and wealthier lover, Detective Alan Banks finds himself plunged into a case where nothing is as it seems. More and more his own words about the victim's latest production, Othello, are coming back to haunt him, for "jealousy, betrayal, envy, ambition, greed, lust, revenge: all the colors of darkness" are quickly becoming his world as well.

A distraught woman arrives at the Eastvale police station desperate to speak to Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks. But since Banks is away on holiday, his partner, Annie Cabbot, steps in. The woman tells Annie that she's found a loaded gun hidden in the bedroom of her daughter, Erin: a punishable offense under English law. When an armed response team breaks into the house to retrieve the weapon, the seemingly straightforward procedure quickly spirals out of control.

A decorated detective inspector is murdered on the tranquil grounds of the St. Peter’s Police Treatment Centre, shot through the heart with a crossbow arrow, and compromising photographs are discovered in his room. Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks is well aware that he must handle the highly sensitive - and dangerously explosive - investigation with the utmost discretion. Because the case may involve police corruption, an officer from Professional Standards, Inspector Joanna Passero, has arrived to work with Banks and his team.

The body of a disgraced college lecturer is found on an abandoned railway line. In the four years since his dismissal for sexual misconduct, he’d been living like a hermit. So where did he get the 5,000 pounds found in his pocket? Leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks begins to suspect that the victim's past may be connected to his death. Forty years ago the dead man attended a university that was a hotbed of militant protest and divisive, bitter politics. And as the seasoned detective well knows, some grudges are never forgotten - or forgiven.

It's a double mystery: Two young men have vanished, and the investigation leads to two troubling clues in two different locations - a scorched van and a peculiar bloodstain in an abandoned airport hangar.

Newly promoted Detective Superintendent Banks finds himself taking on the coldest of cases: a 50-year-old assault allegedly perpetrated by beloved celebrity Danny Caxton. Now Caxton stands accused at the center of a media storm, and it's Banks' job to discover the shocking truth. As more women step forward with accounts of Caxton's manipulation, Banks must piece together decades-old evidence - as the investigation leads him down the darkest of paths....

A shocking mass murder occurs at a wedding in a small Dales church, and a huge manhunt follows. Eventually the shooter is run to ground, and things take their inevitable course. But Banks is plagued with doubts as to exactly what happened outside the church that day and why. Struggling with the death of his first serious girlfriend and the return of profiler Jenny Fuller into his life, Banks feels the need to dig deeper into the murders.

At the doors of a charming country church, an unspeakable act destroys a wedding party. A huge manhunt ensues. The culprit is captured. The story is over. Except it isn't. For Alan Banks, still struggling with a tragic loss of his own, there's something wrong about this case - something unresolved. Reteaming with profiler Jenny Fuller, the relentless detective deeper into the crime...deep enough to unearth long-buried secrets that reshape everything Banks thought he knew about the events outside that chapel.

A young local student has apparently committed suicide. Her body is found in an abandoned car on a lonely country road. She didn't own a car. Didn't even drive. How did she get there? Where did she die? Who moved her, and why? Meanwhile a man in his 60s is found dead in a gully up on the wild moorland. He is wearing an expensive suit and carrying no identification. Post-mortem findings indicate he died from injuries sustained during the fall. But what was he doing up there? And why are there no signs of a car in the vicinity?

Two suspicious deaths challenge DS Alan Banks and his crack investigative team. A young local student’s body is found in an abandoned car on a lonely country road. The death looks like suicide, but there are too many open questions for Banks and his team to rule out foul play. The victim didn’t own a car. A man in his 60s is found dead in a gully up on the wild moorland. He is wearing an expensive suit and carrying no identification. Post mortem findings indicate that he died from injuries sustained during a fall. Was it an accident - did he slip and fall? Or was he pushed?

The 26th instalment of the internationally best-selling DCI Banks series. When the body of a teenage boy is found stuffed into a wheely bin on the East Side Estate, Banks and Annie have a homegrown murder case to solve. But Banks' attention is also on Zelda, who, in helping him track down his old enemy, has put herself in danger and alerted the stone-cold Eastern European sex traffickers who brought her to the UK.

In Eastvale, a young Middle Eastern boy is found dead, his body stuffed in a wheelbarrow on the East Side Estate. Detective Superintendent Banks and his team know they must tread carefully to solve this sensitive case. But tensions rise when they learn that the victim was stabbed somewhere else and dumped. Who is the boy, and where did he come from? Then, in a decayed area of Eastvale scheduled for redevelopment, a heroin addict is found dead. Was this just another tragic overdose or something darker?

The gruesome double murder at an Eastvale property developer's luxury home should be an open and shut case for Superintendent Banks and his team of detectives. There's a clear link to the notoriously vicious Albanian mafia, men who left the country suspiciously soon after the death. Then they find a cache of spy-cam videos hidden in the house - and Annie and Gerry's investigation pivots to the rape of a young girl that could cast the murders in an entirely different light.