Friend of the Devil (Inspector Alan Banks)

On a cliff edge overlooking the North Sea, a quadriplegic woman in a wheelchair stares unseeingly at the waves. She had been murdered. And, miles away, in a storeroom in the Maze, a medieval warren of yards and alleys at the heart of Eastvale, Yorkshire, a young woman lies sprawled on a heap of leather scraps. She too has been murdered. Their bodies are discovered at about the same time that DI Annie Cabbot, on secondment to the Eastern Area force, wakes with a severe hangover in the bed of a young man she barely recognizes. From these three strands, Peter Robinson weaves his latest complex and compelling story.

While DCI Alan Banks tries to figure out how anyone was able to murder Hayley Daniels, when the closed-circuit cameras trained on the entrances to the Maze show that no one preceded or followed her into its shadows, Cabbot learns two things that make her blood run cold: the real intentions of her one-night stand and the true identity of the quadriplegic woman. A ghost from the past is back to haunt both her and Banks.

Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks novels are among the best detective fiction in the world, and their multi-layered stories continue to surprise, engross, thrill, and delight readers. Friend of the Devil is a superb showcase of how deftly he balances horror with humour, police procedures with the nuances of all-too-human emotions, and endings with the promise of new starts. Once again, Robinson transcends the usual limits of the genre in this dazzling novel about the obsessive power of vengeance.

Peter Robinson is the recipient of numerous awards for his Inspector Banks novels, including the prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for the French translation of In a Dry Season, the Edgar Award for the short story “Missing in Action,” Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz Award, and several Arthur Ellis Awards for Best Novel. In 2002, he was awarded the Dagger in the Library by the British Crime Writers’ Association. Robinson was born in Yorkshire, England, and immigrated to Canada after graduating from the University of Leeds. He now lives in Toronto.