{"id":3536,"date":"2020-01-24T04:57:05","date_gmt":"2020-01-24T12:57:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3536"},"modified":"2020-01-29T03:52:53","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T11:52:53","slug":"peter-robinson-many-rivers-to-cross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/peter-robinson-many-rivers-to-cross\/","title":{"rendered":"Peter Robinson: Many Rivers to Cross"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This melancholy, thoughtful novel finds Inspector Banks struggling with some of the knottier issues confronting the world at the moment \u2013 immigration, drug use and human trafficking.\u00a0 Mystery novelists are often among the first to write about \u201cissues,\u201d wrapping them in stories that make the reader think. Robinson is embracing this macro view of the universe, while applying a writer\u2019s micro view \u2013 the humans who populate the drama.<\/p>\n

There are two main story threads in this book.\u00a0 One involves a young Arab boy found dead, stuffed in a garbage bin.\u00a0 The police are having a hard time locating any ties for him, and of course he turns out to be a refugee, with a particularly heartbreaking backstory.<\/p>\n

Robinson is also continuing the story of Zelda, who lives with Annie Cabot\u2019s father, Raymond, and who has a heartbreaking backstory of her own. As a young girl, Zelda had been abducted from the Russian orphanage where she lived and forced into a nightmarish life of prostitution.\u00a0 She is also what is known as a \u201csuper recognizer\u201d \u2013 she never forgets a face, and in that capacity, she\u2019s contracted to help British intelligence.\u00a0 But being a super recognizer, she\u2019s recognized a terrible face from her past, and is out for vengeance.\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t trust the police \u2013 not even Alan, who she considers a friend \u2013 and turns to no one for help, taking matters into her own hands.<\/p>\n

As the police work proceeds that slowly uncovers the story of the dead boy and who the culprit in his murder might be, we as readers also follow Zelda on her journey of vengeance and awful memories.\u00a0 Banks uncovers connections within his city of Eastvale that begin to make the murky case of the dead boy clearer.<\/p>\n

Inspector Banks novels are straight up police procedurals, but they are infused with the human beings who populate the stories.\u00a0 Robinson is one of the more gifted writers at depicting the human heart \u2013 and psyche \u2013 and what makes people do what they do.\u00a0 As his career has progressed, he has gone from being a more traditional writer of British mysteries to a writer concerned with the happenings in the world at large.\u00a0 This does not always make for an easy read, and it is putting Robinson more firmly in the ranks of pure noir writers.\u00a0 The world is his beat, it\u2019s bleak, and his stories reflect this.<\/p>\n

Lovers of Inspector Banks will be happy to know he still loves music and good wine, and the book is infused with some of the music Banks listens to to relax, and as he thinks listening to a Beatles song in a pub, experiencing \u201cpure joy.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s good to live in a world where pure joy also exists.\u00a0 It\u2019s needed, to confront the darkness that Banks encounters in his work.\u00a0 This is a deliberate and intelligent book.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This melancholy, thoughtful novel finds Inspector Banks struggling with some of the knottier issues confronting the world at the moment \u2013 immigration, drug use and human trafficking.\u00a0 Mystery novelists are often among the first to write about \u201cissues,\u201d wrapping them in stories that make the reader think. Robinson is embracing this macro view of the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6,71,72,8,300,291],"class_list":["post-3536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-british","tag-inspector-banks","tag-peter-robinson","tag-police","tag-refugees","tag-william-morrow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3536"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3542,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3536\/revisions\/3542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}