CARELESS LOVE

A corpse deposited in a crashed car clearly marked POLICE AWARE
kicks off DCI Alan Banks’ 25th case.

Builder John Kelly drove his van away from the road accident at
Belderfell Pass, but Trevor and Nancy Vernon had to leave their undriveable car
behind. Imagine their surprise and outrage when a young woman’s body turns up
behind its wheel the following week. It’s pretty clear to Banks and his
Homicide and Serious Crimes Team (Sleeping in the Ground, 2017, etc.) that
Eastvale College student Adrienne Munro choked to death in her own vomit
elsewhere after an overdose of sleeping pills. But nothing else is clear. In
fact, when DI Annie Cabbot is called to the spot on Tetchley Moor where semiretired
banker Laurence Hadfield fell or was pushed to his death in a deep gulley, the
bonds between the two deaths seem more baffling than illuminating. The plot
thickens, but it doesn’t begin to take logical shape until Banks’ friend DCI
Ken Blackstone, of the West Yorkshire Homicide and Major Inquiry Team, brings a
third corpse to their attention: that of Sarah Chen, a University of Leeds
student found beaten to death in an abandoned shack. The deaths of Adrienne
Munro and Sarah Chen, both of whom lied about coming into substantial sums of
money shortly before they died, seem clearly linked. But what connects either
of these promising young women, their lives cut pitifully short, to the
well-heeled banker whose own son acknowledges that he had hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of enemies>?

The answers to these questions aren’t exactly surprising, but
they’re eminently logical and all too depressing. And if the solution depends
on good luck and good timing rather than mental prowess, that’s business as
usual for Robinson’s all-too-human coppers.