A recommended English series for book club--

Our book club received a recommendation for an English detective series recently ("you [the club] don't like English mysteries do you" I was asked and I replied "no" but we had read only two other English mysteries that I readily remembered--[gulp]) and we gave it a shot. And to catch an early story of this series I went with the second book of the series since the library system had only a few copies of the first. The book selected was The Dedicated Man: an Inspector Banks Mystery. The author is Peter Robinson who has a long-running series with his hard-charging detective chief inspector. The Dedicated Man was first published in 1988. Here's a pix of Peter from www.inspectorbanks.com.



"The Dedicated Man" was aptly noted in the discussion group to identify the murder victim, a former professor consumed with local archaeological ruins and now Banks who has catch his killer. Mindful that the more time lingers in a murder case, the harder the case, Banks bounces from Steadman's small circle of friends and associates to find who is the murder. It is one of the those situations where repeated trips are needed to the likely suspects to build or establish a case in court (CBS-TV's "Cold Case" comes to mind). And as Banks finds out, a few who are involved are very tight-lipped.

The book club found the mystery to have a satisfying conclusion and one person--who went on to read other books in the series--said the other stories carry plausible reasons for committing murder (well, in as much as it a sound reason to murder another...).

One person noted how the book title is apt for the murder victim and for Banks who pursues his killer. Robinson says as much about the character through others and gives him a somewhat cloudy past as he's relocated to the smaller Eastvale from London. What job-related incident made Banks want to leave? Robinson says in an interview on "Bookreporter.com" that Banks "becomes more introspective and melancholy [throughout the series]. He is strongly affected by things that happen in his personal life and on the job. In that sense, he's more like a real person, an everyman, not a superhuman thinking machine or one-man vengeance society, and I often see the series as books just about a man and things that happen to him at home and at work."

Banks is by all measures a level-headed fellow with a family and interests in reading literature in "Dedicated Man." However, I later discovered via Wikipedia search that Banks is now divorced and his ex-wife remarried (initially, I did a search for Peter Robinson but found a "Banks" entry too).

Robinson certainly has staying power with his writing--he's up to at least 16 books about Inspector Banks. The newest title, released this year, is Piece of my Heart.