Friend of the Devil

Friend of the Devil is the 17th novel featuring Chief Detective Inspector Alan Banks, and one I wouldn’t miss.  So I haven’t. Banks, now 52 years old, is a well drawn and complex main character—an (inherited from his murdered brother) Porsche driving, music loving, good wine drinking, divorced with two grown children and a longing for the cigarettes he has finally left behind—sort of man leading an ensemble cast in a continuously evolving plot around Eastvale, North Yorkshire.  That cast includes his one-time love interest who he cannot seem to finally let go, Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot, who, this time, is suffering from a bit of her own mid-life crisis (she’s just turned 40) brought on by a wild one-night stand involving pot, alcohol, and naughty photos with a very young man, a nightly habit of drinking to excess, a past rape which has left her psychological and physical relationship to men full of hard questions, and her own feelings of a life once full of promise now slipping away.  And, she still loves Banks.  As they say in Eastvale, “fuck all!”
 
Robinson is a convergence narrative writer and this fine addition to his series involves two seemingly disconnected murders on Mother’s Day—one involving the brutal rape and strangling of a young girl in a shadowy section of Eastvale known as the Maze who was then posed afterward as if only sleeping; the other involving a macabre throat-slashing of a wheelchair-bound mute quadriplegic who had been inexplicably signed out for the murder from her nursing home located miles away on the cliffs overlooking the sea.  Into the thickening of the increasingly grisly plot readers are given artfully crafted and professionally entertaining details of police work complete with interviews with pub patrons, bar staff, mothers, fathers, lawyers, doctors, an assortment of teenagers, as well as former victims and near-victims of Lucy Payne.  Did I say Lucy Payne? I did.  Readers of Robinson will have last seen her in Aftermath (2001) and it is the discovery, by Annie, of the mute quadriplegic’s true identity as one of the most horrific serial killers in the history of the series that brings these two murders, and perhaps their singular murder, together.
 
Highly recommended anywhere, anytime. Probably best when accompanied by a fine single-malt after dining on a decent curry.

 

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