(2023) First time I have read one of this series, however I have seen every episode of the BBC series that played on PBS. Just a solid police procedural. Skeleton is found in a farmers field by archeologists from History Britain to clear the area for a projected highway construction. When it is determined to be only 5 years old and not a Roman soldier, Banks and his crew is brought in to figure out what this is. I had it pretty much figured out early that the murdered man found in the field had himself killed the ex-girlfriend of the student in 1980. Kirkus: An unexpected discovery sends Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his Eastvale crew back to investigate a murder that may or may not have involved the Yorkshire Ripper?s last victim back in 1980.

Combing a parcel of land marked as the site of a new shopping mall for evidence of Roman ruins, archaeologist Grace Hutchinson finds some decidedly more recent remains: the skeleton of a man killed only four or five years ago. The roots of the unknown victim?s death go back even further to the murder of Leeds University senior Alice Poole, a political activist who was killed only a few weeks after the Ripper claimed his last known victim. Was she another casualty of the Ripper, or was her killer someone closer to her? Her schoolmate, downstairs neighbor, and ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Hartley, who comes under suspicion from investigating officers DI Stuart Glassco and DC Christopher Marley in 1980, himself suspects Mark Woodcroft, the lover who replaced him before going AWOL, perhaps to Paris. Back in 2019, Banks, along with DS Winsome Jackman and a group of forensic techs, struggles to identify the anonymous victim. Harold Gillespie, who owned the site of Grace Hutchinson?s discovery at the time of the burial, naturally professes to know nothing about the dead man and points out that he would hardly have buried a man he killed on his own property. But the news that Gillespie is himself a retired police officer leads to a chain of further discoveries. Robinson, who died last October, zigzags deftly back and forth between present and past en route to an anticlimactic solution and a truly devastating last sentence.

Not the best of Robinson?s many Yorkshire mysteries but one of the most heartfelt.
Pub Date: April 11, 2023

ISBN: 9780062994981

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Sad to hear of Robinson's death. I have very much enjoyed following Inspector Banks through his career. ( )

Another bus book but has a great twist. I enjoyed the characters. They developed nicely, plot bounced along well. Made good reading after a slowish start. This is my first inspector Banks book so will have a read of some others. Loced the setting time and the music reference. Made me realise i was definitely of an era. ( )

It's a bit bittersweet to read this book, knowing it's most likely the last entry. But it's a strong one. The greatest mystery driving much of the story: what is the connection between the first-person entries from 1980 about a university student's murder and the discovery in 2019 of the skeleton of someone who died much more recently, found by archeologists in a farm field where a new highway is going in. The two story lines, one related by the murdered student's former boyfriend during the fraught era when the Yorkshire Ripper was at work and the other a third person account of the current investigation, seem to have nothing in common. But surely they must, and by the end of the novel we know how they are parts of the same story.

I enjoyed this novel quite a lot. The investigation is satisfyingly and realistically complex (whose skeleton is it? when did he die? basic questions that are difficult to answer as the case gets underway). The past murder has its own questions, but they're being asked by a young man who can't get any information from the cops. There's the moody setting of a community living in fear as a vicious serial killer goes undetected for years, the political involvement of a leftist activist at a time when the IRA was setting off bombs the Bader Meinhoff gang was seeking revolution through violence, and ultimately a government inquiry into police misconduct by Special Branch undercover units during the period. And then there's an occasional subtle nod toward contemporary politics in the UK, with even an old Tory friend of Banks's disgusted with BJ's antics. It all comes together in the end, when one of the characters says "Let me start at the beginning..." Too bad it's actually the end.

Detective Superintendent Banks and his team are brought in to investigate the provenance of a skeleton unearthed during an archeological dig; the dig was searching for Roman remains but the skeleton is only some 5 or 10 years old. Trouble is, there are no identifying markers to help out the squad, other than for remnants of apparently high-end clothes. The painstaking work of combing through hundreds, if not thousands, of missing persons cases is daunting, but necessary, and eventually a story begins to emerge, one that reaches back 40 years, to the death of a student in 1980….Peter Robinson died suddenly in October of 2022, and this is the swan song of his most beloved character Alan Banks, a detective inspector driven as much by music as by his passion for justice. The story jumps back and forth in time, from a 1980 murder to the 2019 skeleton case, but the reader is never confused about what is when, and the differing threads eventually converge in a very satisfying way. I’ve loved this series for years and am sad to know that there will be no more; we will never know what happens to the main characters going forward, and that is really a shame. Recommended. ( )