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Summary
When Detective Inspector Bill Reid is found murdered in the tranquil grounds of the St Peter’s Police Treatment Centre, and compromising photographs are discovered in his room, DCI Banks is called in to investigate. Because of the possibility of police corruption, he is assigned an officer from Professional Standards, Inspector Joanna Passero, to work closely with him, and he soon finds himself and his methods under scrutiny.
It emerges that Reid’s murder may be linked to the disappearance of an English girl called Rachel Hewitt, in Tallinn, Estonia, six years earlier. The deeper Banks looks into the old case, the more he begins to feel that he has to solve the mystery of Rachel’s disappearance before he can solve Reid’s murder, though Inspector Passero has a different agenda. When Banks and Passero travel to Tallinn to track down leads in the dark, cobbled alleys of the city’s Old Town, it soon become clear that that someone doesn’t want the past stirred up.
Meanwhile, DI Annie Cabbot, just back at work after a serious injury, is following up leads in Eastvale. Her investigations take her to the heart of a migrant labour scam involving a corrupt staffing agency and a loan shark who preys on the poorest members of society. As the action shifts back and forth between Tallinn and Eastvale, it soon becomes clear that crimes are linked in more ways than Banks imagined, and that solving them may put even more lives in jeopardy.
Press Reviews
Playlist
Bach, Sonatas & Partitas, Alina Ibragimova
Mahler, Symphony #2, ‘Resurrection,’ 4th movement
Kate Royal, A Lesson in Love
Ravel, “Gaspard de la Nuit”
Anna Calvi, “Baby, It’s You”
June Tabor, “Finisterre”
June Tabor, The Grey Funnel Line”
June Tabor, “The Oggie Man”
June Tabor, “Across the Wide Ocean”
Bill Evans, Sunday at the Village Vanguard
Shirley & Dolly Collins, “Death and the Lady”
Sandy Denny, “She Moves Through the Fair”
Norma Waterson, “Flowers of Knaresborough Forest”
Bob Dylan, “Red River Shore”
Roy Harper, “I’ll See You Again”
Richard Thompson, “For Shame of Doing Wrong”
Pulp, “Common People”
Ralph Vaughan Williams, “The Lark Ascending”
Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”
Arvo Pärt, “Fratres”
Arvo Pärt, “Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten”
Arvo Pärt, Piano Music
Tüür, “Awakening”
Tüür, “The Wanderer’s Evening Song”
Peter Robinson 