In A Dry Season is the first novel by English/Canadian crime writer Peter Robinson that I’ve had the pleasure to read.
He has written 13 books so far in the “Inspector Banks” series, with his lead character being a tough, left-wing, intellectual policeman who consistently manages to offend his superiors.
Banks has been sidelined by the snobbish Chief Constable leading into this novel. The boss hands him a superficially hopeless case, which Banks proceeds to solve through superior skills of detection.
Set in rural Yorkshire, a village that was abandoned to flooding for a new dam in the 1950s comes to the surface during a prolonged drought. A small boy discovers a skeleton among the ruins.
Banks establishes the date of death as being around the late 1940s. He incredibly identifies the body and pieces together the jigsaw of what happened.
Along the way he has a love interest with his partner on the case, fights with his ex-wife, flirts with another woman and argues with his son.
Some of these peripheral issues I found rather distracting, especially as they had nothing to do with the murder mystery.
Robinson hops between scenes for the narration, focusing on different characters and even different time periods. This worked most of the time, except the irrelevant personal dramas.
Full credit though for the build up of suspense. Unlike some crime novels the series of coincidences were not beyond belief and the ending remained in doubt until the final pages.
An amusing aside for this reader is the possibility that Yorkshire could have a hot, dry summer. I guess everything is relative.
