"On a warm summer night, an attractive woman hurtles north in a blue Peugeot with a hastily scrawled address in her pocket, while, back in London, a desperate man leaves an urgent late-night phone message on his brother's answering machine. By sunrise the next morning, the woman is found inside her car along an otherwise peaceful country lane, shot, execution-style, through the head." "Welcome to the idyllic Yorkshire Dales, where Detective Inspector...

The crime scene awaiting Acting Detective Superintendent Alan Banks is among the worst he has ever encountered. The assailant, Terence Payne, hovers close to death himself. And Payne's brutalized wife, Lucy - whose overheard screams prompted the original call - has already been moved to a local hospital for treatment. But these sins and tragedies pale before what else has transpired in a dank basement the press will soon dub the "House of Payne."...

"When Detective Inspector Bill Reid is found murdered in the tranquil grounds of the St Peter's Police Treatment Centre, and compromising photographs are discovered in his room, DCI Banks is called in to investigate. Because of the possibility of police corruption, he is assigned an officer from Professional Standards, Inspector Joanna Passero, to work closely with him, and he soon finds himself and his methods under scrutiny. It emerges that Reid's...

Maverick police inspector Alan Banks finds himself drawn into London's underworld when he aids his archrival Chief Constable Riddle, after the chief's missing daughter turns up on a pornographic website.

Chief Inspector Alan Banks and Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot must work together to solve two chilling crimes. On loan to a sister precinct, Cabbot draws the first case. Karen Drew seems to have lived a quiet and nearly invisible life for the past seven years. Try as she might, Annie turns up nothing in the woman's past that might have prompted someone to wheel her out to the sea and to her death. Meanwhile, in the Hayley Daniels murder, Banks...

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...

The body of disgraced college lecturer Gavin Miller is found on an abandoned railway line. In the four years since his dismissal for sexual misconduct, hed 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 earlier the dead man attended a university that was a hotbed of...

In November 1980, Nick Hartley returns home from a university lecture to find his house crawling with police. His ex-girlfriend, Alice Poole, has been found murdered, and her new boyfriend Mark Woodcroft is missing. Nick is the prime suspect. The case quickly goes cold, but Nick cannot let it go. He embarks on a career in investigative journalism, determined to find Alice's murderer--but his obsession leads him down a dangerous path. Decades later,...

"Inspector Alan Banks--hailed as "a man for all seasons" by Michael Connelly--must face the music when he becomes embroiled in one of his most perplexing and distressing cases in this haunting page-turner from New York Times bestselling author Peter Robinson. Two women. Two crimes. The first is a poet claiming she was assaulted decades earlier by a man now regarded as one of the country's national treasures. The second is a girl found on a remote...

Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks must face his most challenging and personal case yet. A distraught woman arrives at the Eastvale police station desperate to speak to Banks. Since he's 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,...