Review: ‘When the Music’s Over’

Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks novels invariably include a great many musical references that often interrupt my reading when I head off to check out a song on YouTube.

That got me to thinking while reading the aptly titled 'When the Music's Over” (HarperCollins, $25.99, 421 pages), Robinson's 24th book in the Banks series. While Robinson peppers his prose with specific mentions of particular music, the writing itself has a certain musicality about it, flowing along by use of varied rhythms and cadence. The pace of the narrative slows during plodding police procedural activity and quickens as leads are developed and suspects are hotly pursued. All this culminates in the crescendo of conclusion.

Writing is, after all, an art form, and Robinson is among the finest artists in the crime genre. 'When the Music's Over” isn't the best book in the series, but the author's gift is such that every book is well worth the reader's expense and effort.

No longer an inspector, Banks has been promoted to detective superintendent in the fictional city of Eastvale in the Yorkshire Dales of northern England. Two prominent cases are afoot here, one headed by Banks and the other by Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot. Both feature prominent current social concerns.

Banks is on a cold case, investigating claims of sexual assault against an elderly television personality that allegedly occurred decades ago at the height of his popularity. Cabbot is looking into the recent brutal murder of a young woman on a rural highway.

Banks is attracted to the victim in his case, a sixty-something poet lured to the entertainer's hotel room as a naive 14-year-old on holiday. The case is rife with nostalgia for an era when the victim and Banks came of age. And, sadly, an era when society and the criminal justice system were quicker to turn a blind eye to transgressions by the rich and famous.

Cabbot's case delves heavily into a pervasive cultural problem in today's England. Her victim is traced to a town heavily populated by Muslim Pakistanis and unemployed Brits, groups barely coexisting amid simmering racial tensions. Stir in rumors of sexual grooming, and you have a particularly volatile recipe for unrest.

A police procedural at its heart, 'When the Music's Over” adds Robinson's trademark complexity of style, plotting and character development to create another in a long line of literary treats.