Peter Robinson. In A Dry Season (1999) Banks’s career is in bad shape, his marriage has just about fallen apart. Supt Riddle gives him the job of solving a very cold case when an imaginative boy seeking the Talisman finds a skeleton in the remains of a village long submerged under water but revealed when the reservoir dries up. Banks is assigned DS Annie Cabbot to assist him. The skeleton dates from the second World War, and bears signs of violence. Discovering the killer depends on the usual combination of carefully sifted and collated data, a couple of lucky breaks, and the imaginative empathic insight that Banks relies on to give him the necessary feel of the relationship between victim and killer.
The book is structured as a parallel narrative: one of the participants in those long-ago events has written a memoir-novel, which provides us, and eventually Banks and Cabbot, with part of the solution. The usual niggling details lead to the rest, justice is done, and some of the damage is healed.
An interesting experiment, this structure works reasonably well. I found the wartime story more than readable. I recall a few details of the last year of the war in Austria, and much more than a few details of post-war England, where we lived and visited between 1945 and 1954. That made Robinson’s evocation of war-time England more than a little engaging.
A well done novel, recommended. ***
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