Featuring a foreword by Michael Connelly, this relentlessly suspenseful thriller from the New York Times bestselling and Edgar award-winning author of the Inspector Banks novels marks the first time that Peter Robinson has set a novel in America. Sarah Broughton has come a long way. She's the star of a hit cop show on TV. She lives in a beautiful California beach house. And-most importantly-she's put her dark past behind her… as well as her old...

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...

"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. And the second is a girl found on a remote roadside, her body broken, her life snuffed out. For Alan Banks, newly promoted to Detective Superintendent, the first case rips a tunnel into long-ago days of innocence and discovery, of music and light. And in the victim, he sees an opportunity for magic...

While Banks is on holiday, Det. Insp. Annie Cabbot is called to the woods outside Eastvale, where a hanged manśoon identified as Mark Hardcastle, the local theater's set designerís discovered in a tree. What looks like a simple suicide takes an unexpected turn when the badly beaten body of Hardcastle's boyfriend, Laurence Silber, is found in Silber's posh home. Banks, who returns to assist in the investigation, uncovers Silber's past life as a spy...

Det. Insp. Alan Banks investigates the apparently motiveless murder of Nicholas Barber, a rock journalist from London visiting a small town near Banks's Yorkshire police precinct. Meanwhile, another mystery unfolds in a parallel narrative, the fatal stabbing of a young woman at a local rock festival back in 1969. Needless to say, the cases are intertwined as Banks puts it, "the past is never over" and part of the pleasure is trying to piece together...

The night sky is ablaze as fire engulfs two barges moored end to end on a Yorkshire canal. On board are the blackened remains of two human beings. One was a reclusive and eccentric local artist, the other a junkie, a sad and damaged young girl. To the seasoned eye of Inspector Alan Banks, this horror was no accident, its method so cruel and calculated that only the worst sort of fiend could have committed the dark act. And it isn't long before the...

Stephen Tompkinson returns as Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks in three more gripping crime stories.