Lamar Public Library

"It looks and sounds like a traditional Christmas scene - a log fire, brightly decorated tree, classical music on the stereo. But appearances can be deceptive. Caroline Hartley, the beautiful young woman lying on the sofa, has been brutally murdered." "For Chief Inspector Alan Banks, the former Londoner who is finally beginning to feel at home in Yorkshire, the case is new but the emotions it evokes - anger, outrage, a sense of loss - are familiar."...

Chief Inspector Alan Banks and Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot must work together to solve two chilling crimes. On loan to a sister precinct, Cabbot draws the first case. Karen Drew seems to have lived a quiet and nearly invisible life for the past seven years. Try as she might, Annie turns up nothing in the woman's past that might have prompted someone to wheel her out to the sea and to her death. Meanwhile, in the Hayley Daniels murder, Banks...

Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks must face his most challenging and personal case yet. A distraught woman arrives at the Eastvale police station desperate to speak to Banks. Since he's away on holiday, his partner, Annie Cabbot, steps in. The woman tells Annie that she's found a loaded gun hidden in the bedroom of her daughter, Erin--a punishable offense under English law. When an armed response team breaks into the house to retrieve the weapon,...

The night sky is ablaze as fire engulfs two barges moored end to end on a Yorkshire canal. On board are the blackened remains of two human beings. One was a reclusive and eccentric local artist, the other a junkie, a sad and damaged young girl. To the seasoned eye of Inspector Alan Banks, this horror was no accident, its method so cruel and calculated that only the worst sort of fiend could have committed the dark act. And it isn't long before the...

As he probes the killing of a freelance music journalist, Detective Inspector Alan Banks finds his investigation journeying back in time more than thirty years and into the heart of the mystery surrounding a decades-old crime.

Following a massacre at a Yorkshire church, Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his team are challenged to unravel a mystery involving a killer who is hiding in plain sight.

"On a warm summer night, an attractive woman hurtles north in a blue Peugeot with a hastily scrawled address in her pocket, while, back in London, a desperate man leaves an urgent late-night phone message on his brother's answering machine. By sunrise the next morning, the woman is found inside her car along an otherwise peaceful country lane, shot, execution-style, through the head." "Welcome to the idyllic Yorkshire Dales, where Detective Inspector...

An admired local historian is found dead and half-buried in a farmer's field in the village of Gratly. A slimy land-developer, an editor, a local thriller writer, and a beautiful folk singer are all figures from the historian's past, and all of them are suspects. Sally, a young would-be actress, knows more than she's telling and wants to solve the case herself, but may find herself in danger. There's trouble brewing beneath Gratly's idyllic...

From New York Times bestselling and Edgar Award-winning author Peter Robinson comes a suspenseful and frightening tale of the connection between a missing child and the murder of a young man in the sixth book of the critically acclaimed Inspector Banks Mystery Series.
A well-dressed couple claim to be social workers responding to abuse allegations and pressure Brenda Scupham into allowing them to take her seven-year-old daughter,...

On a warm summer night, an attractive woman hurtles north in a blue Peugeot with a hastily scrawled address in her pocket, while, back in London, a desperate man leaves an urgent late-night phone message on his brother's answering machine. By sunrise the next morning, the woman is found inside her car along an otherwise peaceful country lane, shot, execution-style, through the head. Welcome to the idyllic Yorkshire Dales, where Detective Inspector...