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NOT DARK YET concludes the story line first begun in CARELESS LOVE, focusing on Zelda's past and present and resolving the questions it raised. It begins with Zelda, who is travelling in eastern Europe, in Moldova, the land of her childhood and where she had first been forced into the sex trade from which she had finally escaped by killing her exploiter and fleeing to Britain.
Zelda has ended up in Yorkshire and is happily partnered with Ray Cabot, thirty years her senior and an artist of some note. Ray is, not incidentally, the father of DI Annie Cabot, who was once Banks' lover.
The narrative shifts from eastern Europe to Yorkshire, where a local version of Hugh Hefner has been found, dead and disembowelled, in his swimming pool. Banks oversees the case but is not actively involved in the investigation, due to his present senior rank. It is left to Annie Cabot and DC Gerry Masterson to try to make sense of the case.
Just as Zelda's past is the point of departure for this 27th entry in the Inspector Banks series, someone from Banks' own history makes an ominous appearance. Phil Keane, an arsonist who once almost cost Banks his life, has been seen in the neighbourhood, using another name.
Writers who have the good fortune to reach a broad audience with their series and the talent to sustain them often face a difficult place as the story unfolds. Readers are frequently as interested in the central character as in plot and expect that character to develop over the arc of the novels in a realistic sort of way.
At some point, then, especially when the protagonist is a policeman, age becomes an issue. Sooner or later, he has to retire or totter ridiculously into a improbably lengthy career.
There is also the problem of setting. How often can a locale be described? How many murders can a small area reasonably produce? When the books are set in a large city, these are not a problem, but when Robinson decided to set his series in rural Yorkshire, which he lovingly describes over the course of twenty-seven novels, it is difficult to find something new to say.
Robinson addresses the problem by shifting the focus of attention off Banks in favour of Zelda, about whom we learn more of her back story and whose travels abroad take her many kilometres away from Yorkshire. Zelda has developed over the three most recent entries in the series from an intriguingly foreign, if minor, presence to a robust character that dominates a good half of this novel.
Zelda is complex, difficult, and in the end presents an essentially unsolvable ethical and moral problem more suspenseful than the question of who killed Connor Clive Blaydon and left his body in the pool. In short, NOT DARK YET is less a police procedural than an investigation into questions of character and moral choice.
And it is all the better for it. The "yet" of the title struck me as a bit ominous - not dark yet but soon?
When I finished the book, I was pleased to find I'd worried unnecessarily. Peter Robinson has found ways to take his investigation of Detective Superintendent Alan Banks into new and interesting places, where readers will be delighted to venture.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2021
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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