Peter Robinson Keeps Readers on Their Toes

 

 

 

CARELESS LOVE (2019)

By Peter Robinson

★★★★

 

I’m always on the lookout for mystery writers who are new to me. Every time I go to the transfer station, I check the shelves of free books left behind by folks who donate them rather than throw them away and grab titles that intrigue me. I had heard of Peter Robinson but had never read him, but after sampling Careless Love, I grabbed another one last week.

I think I may have seen an episode or two of DCI Banks on ITV when visiting Scotland, though it hasn’t been aired since 2016. DCI stands for Detective Chief Inspector, the top investigation officer among British police units who is outranked only by a Detective Superintendent. (They are mostly administrators.) When we meet the debonair Alan Banks in Yorkshire, he is driving a police car and bemoaning the fact that his beloved Porsche is in the garage to investigate a report of an abandoned car in Belderfell Pass with a young woman’s body in it. She is dressed to the nines as if she were on the way to a party. That’s odd because the same car had a crash at the same location the previous week and its owners had called for help. Banks interviews them, but they haven’t the slightest idea who she is or how she ended up behind the wheel of their undrivable Ford Focus covered with POLICE AWARE yellow tape. Banks takes an instant dislike to owner Trevor Vernon, who makes a racist remark about a black investigator with Banks, but it’s pretty clear that neither Vernon nor his wife are likely suspects. They do discover after putting her picture on the news that the dead woman is Adrienne Munro, a 19-year-old student at Eastvale College.

Nothing adds up for Banks. Everyone he interviews–family, friends, professors– says the same thing: Adrienne was a serious and stellar student who worked hard, seldom went out, and though quite beautiful, had no serious boyfriend and kept a low social profile. One female friend tells Banks that she had been stressed the previous year over money, but that she had just won a big award that had alleviated that woe. No one considered her a suicide risk. So how did she end up inside a crashed car in a remote area that’s not walkable to anywhere?

 

To add to the confusion, DI Annie Cabbot from an adjacent jurisdiction has a conundrum of her own. She’s trying to identify a mysterious corpse of a man found in a vale in the moors. He is in his 60s, well-dressed, and wearing expensive shoes that would be unsuitable for hiking in the moors. His injuries are consistent with having fallen off the path and down an embankment. Yet, there are no tire marks or explanation of how he would have gotten to such an off-the-road location. When he is identified as Laurence Hadfield, an answer seems even more elusive. He was a rich, widower businessman with a foul-mouthed, wild-but-privileged daughter named Poppy. Banks suspects that Hadfield might have been having an affair with Adrienne, but Poppy has never heard of Adrienne and a student named Colin, who admitted being in (unrequited) love with Adrienne, has never heard of Hadfield. It’s only after a third victim, Sally, is found that Banks and Cabbott even know which direction to turn!

When things seem too good or bad to be true in Careless Love, they usually aren’t. Poppy is a slutty mess whom Banks ends up babysitting as a potential witness, but to what? The only clue is a single name, Mia, who might have known the victims, but who is she? Things will get murkier and darker before they get better. This is my favorite kind of mystery, one that doesn’t scream its resolution from the top of the hill. The victims aren’t quite the angels they appeared to be, nor is Banks an omniscient Holmes-like investigator. Follow the money is usually good advice, but even that isn’t what you might suspect. In other words, Robinson blends the mystery and thriller genres and tosses in misdirection. It may seem odd to call a novel with murder and unseemly circumstances at its core satisfying, but Careless Love keeps secrets even after the murderer has been fingered.

Rob Weir