Blood at the Root (Inspector Banks Mysteries)

When the brutally beaten body of a young man is found in an ally, Eastvale's Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and his colleague, Detective Constable Susan Gay, have no choice but to lack up the three Pakistani youths who seemingly started it all after an argument in a pub.But they're out in no time and Banks is in big trouble with the Chief for risking a racial incident with the arrest. Ordered to run the investigation from his desk and leave the legwork to others, Banks' handes are tied and his temper is flaring.

But when disturbing facts start emerging about the victim, Banks can't simply sit at his desk--and he soon alinates himself from both the investigation and his own department. While his twenty-year marriage crumbles around him, he tries to make sense of a gray world grown ever more black and sinister, as he follows a treacherous trail of hate, greed, and twisted philosophy that leads to the darkest pits of a man's inhumanity to man.Brilliant and exasperating by turns, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks inhabits a Yorkshire landscape colored in shades of gray where good and evil seldom conform to their comfortingly ordinary colors of black and white.

Former London Policeman Alan Banks relocated to Yorkshire seeking some small measure of peace. But his new venue, the quaint little village of Eastvale, seems to have more than its fair share of malefactors.

Among the local wrongdoers is a brazen Peeping Tom who has been spying on attractive, unsuspecting ladies as they prepare for bed. Then, an elderly woman is found brutally slain in her home. And suddenly, perverse and murderous acts — perhaps related, perhaps not — are combining to profoundly touch Bank's suddenly vulnerable personal life.

Hatred and murder breed in dark places ...

In the long shadows of an alley a young man is murdered, savagely kicked and beaten to death by assailant or assailants unknown. It is a crime shocking in its raw brutality, and its shattering repercussions will be felt throughout a small provincial community on the edge — because the victim was far from innocent, a youth whose sordid secret life was a tangle of terrifying contradictions and virulent racial hatred. And now a dedicated policeman beset by his own tormenting demons must follow the leads into the rankest pits of man's inhumanity to man — to catch a killer before his village explodes.

Peter Robinson's award-winning novels have been named a Best-Book-of-the-Year by Publishers Weekly, a Notable Book by the New York Times, and a Page-Turner-of-the-Week by People magazine. Robinson was born and raised in Yorkshire, but has lived in North America for more than twenty-five years. He now divides his time between North America and the U.K.