When the Music's Over

This is my favourite Inspector Banks story in the series – which I am now close to completing for the second time. I’ve been lucky enough to have read them in order of publication. This isn’t necessary, but if you do approach them so, you get a wonderful sense of growth and change in all the characters. Or as much as a detective series needs; after all the mystery’s the thing, not Dostoyevskian interiority. That said, every individual is an individual, with all their quirks and oddities. (I love the way his colleagues are always dumbfounded by Banks’ taste in music.)

And they’re all good, gripping mysteries. (I’ve only been disappointed by two books in a run of twenty-eight.) They move a brisk pace - you’re thrown right into the crime within a page or two – but they never sidestep the slow, steady accretion of detail that goes into any police investigation: interviews, evidence, hypotheses.

What probably elevates them to the top of the ladder is their willingness to deal with modern crime. When the Music’s Over is about sexual predators and grooming gangs. Other books have looked at human trafficking, county lines, serial murders and modern-day slavery. They’re as far from Colonel Mustard in the Billiard Room with the Lead Pipe as you can get.

Sadly for us fans, Peter Robinson died last year. But he left us quite a legacy. And if I’m lucky enough, then before I follow him I will quite probably read Inspector Banks’ adventures for a third – wonderful – time.