Inspector Alan Banks mysteries

A dedicated man a former university professor, wealthy historian, and archaeologist who loved his adopted village is dead in the wild outdoors. It is a particularly heinous slaying, considering the esteem in which the victim, Harry Steadman, was held by his neighbours and colleagues by everyone, it seems, except the one person who bludgeoned the life out of the respected scholar and left him half-buried in a farmer's field. Detective Chief Inspector...

Visitors have long been drawn to the beauty and serenity of the Yorkshire countryside. Some never leave--like the hiker whose decomposing corpse is discovered in a wooded valley outside the tiny village of Swainshead. It is the second such homicide to plague the region in recent years, and it is pulling investigating Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks into a dangerous mire of dark pasts, local power, and private shames. For a shocking truth and...

Inspector Alan Banks probes the abduction of a seven-year-old girl, taken from her single-parent mother by a couple masquerading as social workers. By the author of The Hanging Valley.

In England, a schoolgirl is strangled on church grounds and suspicion falls on the vicar, already involved in a sex scandal. But Inspector Banks thinks that a little too obvious and his probe leads him to a schoolteacher. By the author of Final Account.

In the blistering, dry summer, the waters of Thornfield Reservoir have been depleted, revealing the ruins of the small Yorkshire village that lay at its bottom--ruins that house the unidentified bones of a murdered young woman. Detective Chief Inspector Banks faces a daunting challenge: he must unmask a sadistic killer who has escaped detection for half a century. For the dark secrets of Hobb's End continue to haunt the dedicated policeman, even though...

"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."...

Investigating a dual arson case that has claimed three lives on an English canal, Detective Inspector Banks teams up with fellow investigator Annie Cabot and discovers that the victims are linked to an art forgery operation.

New York Times bestselling author Peter Robinson's Chief Inspector Alan Banks must turn to a murder committed in the 1960s in order to solve a present-day homicide as he races to uncover their common link.

1969 . . . In an era of free love and rebellion, a dead body is discovered among the detritus of a recently concluded rock festival—a beautiful young woman stabbed so savagely through the chest that a piece of her heart was sliced

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When the body of a man is discovered hanging from a tree in the woods near Eastvale, all signs point toward suicide. Inspector Banks finds himself plunged into a case where nothing is as it seems.

"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...

"As Banks and his team follow what few clues they have, desperate to find the missing boy, who holds the key to the puzzle, they find themselves branching out in different directions. As the end game becomes a race against time, even Banks's team isn't safe from the rage of the hunted animal."--

At the doors of a charming country church, an unspeakable act destroys a wedding party. A huge manhunt ensues. The culprit is captured. The story is over. Except it isn't. For Alan Banks, there is something unresolved about this case. Reteaming with profiler Jenny Fuller, the detective digs deeper into the crime, deep enough to unearth long-buried secrets that reshape everything Banks though he knew about the events outside the chapel. When...

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...

"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,...